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WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


WSO TER MOIS ie dea 
Edward Leigh Pell 





Why I Believe in Jesus. A personal ex- 
perience! ie. ote GSR es SE DD 


What Did Jesus "Really Teach—A bout 
Prayer? <A startlingly frank treatment of 
our perplexing questions about prayer. $1.50 


Bringing oe John. A book for parent and 
teacher U7 ee ae a eae 


Our Troublesome A ahh dbus Questions. 
$1.50 


How Can I Lead My Pupils to Christ? 
$1.00 


Secrets of Pee School he oR atch 
12mo, cloth . . $1.25 


THE PELL BIBLE STORIES 
Illustrated, each arb ay Me fi ; 50 
The Story of Abraham—As Told by 


Isaac. 


The Story of Joseph—The Dreamer. 


The Story of David—The Idol of the 
People. 


The Story of Paul—As Told by Himself. 
The Story of Jesus—For Little People. 





WHY T BELIEVE 
IN JESUS GaN OF PRIN ES 


Q 

i NOVO 1926 
| », 
A Personal Experience €o) néinal Ras 


2 
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hrs 






By y 
EDWARD LEIGH PELL 


Author of ‘ rei emery) us Really Teach 
out Prayer,’ etc. 





New York CHICAGO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LonDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, 1926, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 


New York! 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 99 George Street 


An Attempt to Make 
Plain and Real the 
Jesus of the Gospels 
and of Experience. 


“That Christ may dwell m your 
hearts through faith; to the end that 
ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 
may be strong to apprehend with all 
the saints what 1s the breadth and 
length and height and depth, and to 
know the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge, that ye may be filled unto 
all the fulness of God.’’ 

HPHESIANS 3; 17-19. 


FOREWORD 


N this book I have tried to reproduce a series 
| of lectures or addresses which I am now giv- 
ing in American cities and towns on Why I 
Believe in Jesus: A Personal Experience, omit- 
ting some things which could not be effectively 
presented in print, and adding some things which 
could not be effectively presented to an audience 
under the limitations of a popular address. 

In rearranging the matter in chapters for the 
convenience of the reader, I have found it neces- 
sary to change the order of treatment, and this 
has required much re-writing; but I hope that 
those who have heard the lectures as I have 
given them from the platform or pulpit, will find 
that the message itself remains unchanged. 


He 
Richmond, Virginia. 





CONTENTS 


Ir WE WouupD REALLY BELIEVE. . . «© « . 


tf 


II. 


Hil. 


IV. 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS . . . 
Seeing Him in people I knew—My first reason 
for believing in Him—A tragedy that yields 
more than it cost—A new view of life—Ap- 
proaching the Bible from a different point of 
view—A discovery that has helped me. 


CLEARING THE WAY FOR A VIEW OF JESUS 


IN THE GOSPELS . . 

What we want to find Onaiaclne iol bel Ree 
aside—Agreeing upon a working theory about 
the Bible—Danger of thinking of Jesus as a 
“book character’—Our business not to find 
Jesus through a certain channel, but to find 
Jesus—I get a bit of advice which I would not 
part with for the world. 


EL GUD TEES WLAN IO citicoaint fuze Meus 
Gazing upon Him from the Poadeetne man I 
see: a physician with a gentle hand; a teacher 
who awakens a new hope; a friend who goes the 
limit—A close-up view: conceptions of His ap- 
pearance; His eyes; His touch; His winsome 
way of speaking; His magnetism; His bound- 
less sympathy—Another reason for believing 
in Him. 

AN UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE OF JESUS 
The modern conception of an “athletic Christ” 
—A picture that attracts some to the human in 
Jesus but blinds them to the divine in Him— 


An impossible conception in the light of the 
Gospels. 


Wuat WE See 1x Hm Tuat Draws Us 
Glimpses of a character that is human but more 
than human—His unique love—-What His sac- 

9 


12 
13 


27 


AT 


63 


78 


10 


VI. 


Waid 


Vill. 


1B.G 


CONTENTS 


rificial love does for men—lI find a third reason 
for believing in Him. 


Otner IMPRESSIONS OF THE Man HIMSELF 
His immaculateness—A gentle trait of strong 
characters—His tender feeling for the ostra- 
cised—His heroism—‘‘Meekness” not weakness 
but gentlemanliness of spirit—Jesus not a non- 
resister—The Power of His character to make 
us see ourselves. 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF UNDERSTAND- 


ING His TEACHINGS . .. +; ES 
Why Jesus is still the most Pi aely misunder- 
stood teacher the world has ever known—Our 
insistence upon interpreting His words either 
literally or from our own point of view—Intel- 
lectual difficulties—Spiritual difficulties—Our 
selfish point of view—Our exaggerated ideas of 
the value of physical comfort. 


A Wispom THat Is From ABovE. . ., 


A vision that sweeps both worlds at once—The 
only teacher who shows familiarity with the 
unseen—His ideas of the other world compared 
with those of Socrates—His ideas of life and 
its problems compared with the best specimens 
of human wisdom—How he would solve the 
problems of war and marriage—I find a fourth 
reason for believing in Him. 


His SuPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN 


NEEDS fo iniis OU hewn, ; 
His ideas of religion cortbare ea ident 
popular ideas of what His religion is—The idea 
of saving men by attaching them to a thing 
compared with His idea of saving them by 
attaching them to a Person. 


His Intimate KNOWLEDGE OF GoD. . . 
Why he would have us believe in God’s prov- 
idential care—His plan to help us find the way 
to God—His Father is our Father—His knowl- 
edge of Himself—His consciousness of being 
absolutely untouched by sin. 


92 


110 


123 


140 


149 


CONTENTS 11 


XI. THe Greatest Reason or Abu. . . . 162 
People of to-day listen to preachers with inter- 
rogation points in their eyes—“Do you know 
that of yourself or did you get it out of a 
book?”—The modern attitude toward personal 
testimony to the power of Christ—Nothing un- 
canny about knowing Christ—Medizval mysti- 
cism out of date, but not true mysticism—The 
most satisfying reason I have for believing in 
Jesus—What is our deepest need?—How do I 
know that Jesus has met my deepest need? 


XII. How Can WE PRESERVE OvuR SENSE OF THE 


REALITY OF JESUS. . . Vint 
The daily programme of our iédern life ieee 

no room for the cultivation of our sense of the 
realities of the unseen—How strong Christians 

in all ages have preserved their sense of the 
reality of Jesus—Comradeship as necessary to 

the preservation of our relationship with Christ 

as it is to the preservation of a vital relation- 

ship with our loved ones—How I feel toward 
Jesus. 


IF WE WOULD REALLY BELIEVE 


‘“How 18 ut that you have managed to hold on to 
your faith through all the staggering develop- 
ments and wearing stran of our trying tume?’’ 

‘‘Do you remember the answer which Phillips — 
Brooks gave to the young man who wanted to 
know whether a vital union with Christ rs essen- 
tial to Christiamty? ‘Son,’ said the bishon, ‘vital 
union with Christ is Chrishiamty!’ ”’ 

‘You mean that rt 1s because you have been a 
Christian in that sense that you have managed 
to go on your way undisturbed? But that means 
that you have preserved your sense of the reality 
of the divine Christ, and that’s my trouble. Our 
present ciwilization 1s a blinding whirlpool that is 
utterly destructwe of one’s sense of the reality of 
spirit, and I have lost my sense of the divine 
Christ in Jesus. What can I do?’’ 

“Pull yourself out of the whirlpool, and let us 
seek a quiet spot where we can think this matter 
over together.’’ 


I 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 


I 


DID not get my first impressions of Jesus 
| from a man’s Bible. I got them from a little 
child’s Bible—my mother’s face. My little 
mother was saturated through and through with 
the mind and spirit of Jesus, and it must have 
been at a very tender age that I caught my first 
glimpse of Him in her beautiful eyes; that I first 
heard Him in her gentle voice; that I first felt 
Him in her tender touch. 

It is impossible at this distance to distinguish 
with certainty between the things I have imagined 
about my childhood and the actual experiences of 
those early days; but at this moment it seems to 
me that my first impression of Jesus was of one 
who was in some way intimately associated with 
my mother, that His heart was like her heart, that 
He was in some sense the secret of all that made 
her so beautiful and precious to me—that her love 
was a part of His love, her gentleness a part of 
His gentleness, her patience a part of His patience. 
A part of this picture may have developed in later 


years, but I am sure that, from the beginning, 
13 


14 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


Jesus and the things that made my mother beau- 
tiful were somehow bound up together. He was 
the Good One and my mother was good, and they 
loved each other. When I began to hear of bad 
people I distinguished them as people who did not 
love Jesus like my mother, and who were bad 
because they didn’t. 

Then there was the Quiet Lady across the street. 
She was a Quaker, whose life, by reason of an 
unfortunate marriage, was full of trouble; but 
something held her, and her sweet face was as calm 
as the silvery moon that used to look down upon 
me through my window at night. She was an in- 
effably beautiful spirit like my mother, who loved 
the same Jesus my mother loved, and she had a 
habit of going to her room every morning when 
her housework was over, and locking the door and 
spending an hour with that same Jesus. She did 
not tell me it was Jesus, but she always carried 
her Bible with her and I understood. I must have 
understood for I never dared to peek through the 
keyhole. And always when she came out she 
looked as if she had seen Him. Doubtless it was 
what I saw of Him in her that enlarged my view 
of Jesus, from one who was associated with my 
mother, to One who loved everybody and who 
made everybody good that loved Him. 

As I grew older I came in contact with other 
beautiful spirits whose faces and lives confirmed 
these first impressions, and in some cases no 
doubt added something to them. 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 15 


And then came, in my university days, a man 
who, to my mind, was one of the most Christlike 
spirits I have ever known. He was so thoroughly 
saturated with the mind and spirit of Jesus that 
one could hardly look at him without thinking of 
Jesus. He was known in the classroom as our 
professor of English Literature, but on the 
campus as the boys’ friend; and when a boy’s bad- 
ness got him into trouble, going to ‘‘Old Mang,’’ 
as he was affectionately called, was like going to 
God. Buta very friendly, fatherly God. He was 
the only argument for religion we had on the 
campus that every boy could understand. Some- 
times a sophomore would come to me to make fun 
of religion, and he would say: ‘‘Look at Old 
Blank. He has a head as big as a barrel, and he 
doesn’t see anything in your religious stuff.’’ 
And I would stand before him as helpless as a 
dummy—until I thought of ‘‘Old Mang.’’ And 
then it would occur to me that there was not a 
boy on the campus who, if he got into trouble, 
could be persuaded to go to ‘‘Old Blank,’’ and not 
one who would hesitate to go to ‘‘Old Mang.’’ 
Even a sophomore could understand that argu- 
ment. And sometimes I could go further. I could 
say, mentally if not vocally: 

‘‘ John, religion has made ‘Old Mang’ what he 
is. No religion has made you what you are. 
Which has done the better job? 

‘¢ ‘Old Mang’ has enough moral courage to face 
the world, the flesh and the devil for God and 





16 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


right and truth and humanity. How much have 
you? 

‘“¢‘Old Mang,’ brought up from childhood in 
comradeship with the immaculate Christ, has 
been all his life as pure as his own mother. How 
pure are you?’’ 

These, and similar recollections of early im- 
pressions, leave me no room to doubt that I first 
began to believe in Jesus because of what I saw 
of Him in the faces and lives of those in whom He 
lived. And this is one of the reasons I have for 
believing in Him to-day. All through my life I 
have been looking for Him in the lives of others, 
and in this quest I have seen things which have 
helped to hold me to my faith when almost every- 
thing else seemed to fail. I have seen His mind 
and spirit come into the minds and spirits of men 
in ways which could not be accounted for on nat- 
ural grounds. I have seen Him perform miracles 
upon the souls of men that were far more wonder- 
ful than anything He ever did for the bodies of 
men when he was here in the flesh. I have seen 
Him pick-up poor wrecks of humanity—pick them 
up out of the ditch, wash them off, break the 
chains of sin that bound them, quicken their 
spirits, open their eyes, start them off to live the 
life of the spirit, and by daily comradeship with 
them help them on up toward the heights of the 
kingdom of God, developing them day after day 
until they stood before God, His full- Brae sons, 
the image of Christ in there faces. 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 17 


How I wish you could see the faces that are 
passing before my mind’s eye at this moment! 
Yonder is an editor of a daily paper. A few 
years ago that man was a mere make-believe of a 
man. He did not count at all. To-day he is the 
greatest moral force in his community—a man 
with more spiritual power than a thousand ordi- 
nary men. 

There goes a girl who started in life without a 
chance. Jesus came into her life and gave her a 
chance. She is a perfectly normal, happy-hearted 
girl; loves boyish sports; plays baseball with an 
enthusiasm that fairly takes your breath. But 
you may call that girl from her game to-day and 
offer her the hardest job for Christ a girl was 
ever given to do, and she will spring to it as 
zealously and with as much enthusiasm as she 
would spring to her baseball. 

Here comes an old man—a physician. That 
man has given his life so unreservedly to the 
service of Christ among the poor, that after fifty 
years of heavy practice he is still compelled to live 
in a rented house. No, that is a mistake; he has 
passed away and he no longer needs a shelter. 
But I can see him still; and I can see a vast throng 
of men and women who, if he should pass by, could 
barely refrain from kissing his shadow on the 
pavement. You can hardly mention his name 
among the poor without bringing tears of grati- 
tude and love to their eyes. 

Yonder is a girl, one of the most beautiful 


18 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


spirits I have ever known. She is the only child 
of worshipping parents; she is beautiful; she has 
all the money a girl could want; and yet such is 
her devotion to Christ that I verily believe she 
could lay her little body down upon the cross and 
stretch out her hands to receive the nails for Him. 

Just over there is the face of a man who for 
many years was an employer of thousands of 
working men. That man went among his em- 
ployees as Jesus would have gone; entered into 
their lives, not only with a boundless sympathy, 
but with a brotherly appreciation of them; stood 
by them; stood up for them; continued faithful to 
them unto the end. The end came a year or two 
ago; and, to-day, if you should mention his name 
in an audience of working men anywhere in the 
state in which he lived, a great silence would fall 
upon them like the silence of men who in a lumi- 
nous moment of life have become conscious of 
God. 

Yonder go two women. One of them is a high- 
born girl of one of the finest families in the land. 
The other was for twenty years a poor woman of 
the streets. That high-born girl went down into 
the slums and picked her up and brought her to 
Christ. And then she stood by her, and through 
her comradeship and care that poor woman came 
to be, next to that girl, the greatest power for 
Christ in the community. 

Has everything gone wrong? Is there a cloud 
over the sun? Have you lost your grip? Has 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 19 


God become a mere shadow? Do you feel as if the 
very foundations of life have given way beneath 
your feet? Is your spirit so desolate that you 
eannot read your Bible, cannot pray, cannot in- 
terest yourself in any service for Christ or hu- 
manity? Do you feel as if you were almost ready 
to doubt your own existence? Put on your hat 
and go out and look for Him in the faces and lives 
of people in whom he lives. If you could see the 
faces that are passing before me now you would 
see the handiwork of One who is beyond human; 
you would see a life which you could not account 
for on natural grounds. You would see a spirit 
which could not have come from anyone but Him. 
And you would go back to your work saying in 
your heart: 

“Doubt Him? How can I doubt Him? I have 
seen Him.”’ 


II 


But I must be frank. While I have what I be- 
lieve to be the best of reasons for believing in 
Jesus, [am not sure that any one of them, or all of 
them together, would count for much with me to- 
day if I knew no more about Him or about life and 
the life of the spirit which we call religion than I 
knew in those early days when I was able to be- 
lieve in Him simply because of what I saw of Him 
in the lives of others. For in spite of my early 
Christian training I was hardly out of sight of 
my mother’s home before I began to look at life 


20 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


from the world’s everyday point of view—a point 
from which it is practically impossible to see any- 
thing that is of the spirit with sufficient clearness 
to be sure of its existence. I did not call myself a 
materialist—I had a horror of materialism. And 
the spiritual ideals my mother gave me were still 
lingering about my head like beautiful butterflies 
trying to entice me to follow them. But even while 
I was conscious of them I began to absorb from 
my environment the popular view, that while the 
spiritual side of life was beautiful and quite im- 
portant for the brief poetic or emotional periods 
of life—for childhood and protracted iulness and 
the dark nights of bereavement and the hour of 
death,—in everyday life it was matter, not spirit, 
that counted, and one must plan one’s life in the 
main from that point of view. If I had continued 
to look at life from that point of view—the point 
from which we see the material side of life as a 
mountain and the spiritual side as a molehill—I 
should to-day be able to believe in the human 
Jesus, but so far as I can now see I should have 
no grounds whatever for a real faith in the divine 
Christ in Jesus. Fortunately for me something 
happened. 

One day—it was a strangely warm day in 
November—I stood at my window feasting my 
eyes upon a beautiful tree nearby that was all cov- 
ered with a glory of golden autumn leaves. Sud- 
denly a shadow came over the sky, and turning 
my eyes, I saw that a great storm-cloud had come 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 21 


out of the West and now seemed to be making 
its way like a terrible monster directly toward my 
tree. There was a moment of ominous silence and 
then the monster blew a frightful blast which 
struck my tree, shook it, tore it, stripped it of all 
its golden glory, and left it as bare and poor and 
ugly as a skeleton. 

I turned away with a shudder, and soon after- 
wards, something like that happened to me. A 
wild storm of life suddenly swept down upon me, 
gave me a staggering blow, shook me, tore me, 
stripped me of all the little golden glory I had 
gathered about me, and then picked me up and 
tossed me against the thin partition that sepa- 
rates this life from the unseen. And there it left 
me, as bare and empty-handed as a babe newly- 
born. And there I lay hovering between life and 
death and too weak to think of either. 

One day I opened my eyes, and there came to 
me what I have come to believe to be the most 
wonderful experience that ever comes to a human 
being next to his discovery of God. The tragedy 
that had overtaken me had swept out of my way 
all the material interests which blind men to the 
truth, and for the first time in my life I looked 
out upon life with an unobstructed vision. I saw 
things as they were. I could distinguish moun- 
tains from molehills, substance from shadow, gold 
from tinsel. I could see how small were the tran- 
sient things that had appeared so great and how 
great were the eternal things that had appeared 


22 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


so small. And everything was turned round. For 
years the material side of life had been practi- 
cally everything and the spiritual side only 
incidental; now I saw that the spiritual side was 
everything and the material side only incidental. 
And with this new view of life came a new view of 
God, a new view of His truth, a new view of my 
Bible. Everything was different. And when I 
looked upon Jesus the divine Christ in Him was 
as real as my own mother. Everything about 
- Him that had seemed strange now appeared nat- 
ural. Many things in His teachings, which had 
always appeared unreasonable or impracticable, 
now appeared to me as the teachings of the high- 
est wisdom.. Everything about him had become 
so natural that believing in him seemed the most 
natural thing in the world. 

From that day I have never lost a moment’s 
sleep over the religious difficulties which are giv- 
ing trouble to so many thoughtful people of our 
day. I have not ignored them, but they have 
ceased to frighten me. When a man reaches the 
point from which the spiritual side of life is every- 
thing and the material side is only ineidental, 
there is nothing in sight to frighten him. 

It did not occur to me at the time just what had 
happened to me. Not until several years after- 
wards did the truth dawn upon me that, when the 
blinding materialities of life were swept from 
before my eyes, I was almost where Jesus had 
placed Himself when He came into the world. 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 23 


That is, so far as my point of view was concerned. 
Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean that I 
was given the vision of the Son of Man who had 
not where to lay His head. I only mean that I 
had come to the point of view to which all men 
come when they take their stand irrevocably with 
Him. I was where I could see things, not with 
His eyes, but from His point of view, and so far 
as my vision extended I could see that what He 
had taught was true. 


Tit 


And yet I am not sure that even this discovery 
would have made my reasons for believing in Him 
sufficiently strong for the trials of faith which we 
are passing through to-day. There are times 
when we need something more than an appeal to 
reason or even to our spiritual vision—times when 
nothing is strong enough to steady our faith un- 
less it is accompanied by an appeal to our hearts. 
Convinced as I am of the sufficiency of the reasons 
I have for believing in Jesus, I am not sure that I 
would believe in Him to-day if I had not discov- 
ered a truth that appeals to my heart—if I had 
not discovered that He believes in me. 

The faith which Jesus had in humanity is one 
of the greatest marvels of history. When He 
came into the world humanity was a drug on the 
market. In my boyhood there were times when 
watermelons were so plentiful that a farmer, after 


24 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


trying all through the day to dispose of his stock, 
would offer his entire wagon-load for a dollar 
bill. That is what we mean by a drug on the 
market. It was difficult to dispose of human 
beings at any price. People went to war, not for 
the men they could catch, but for land and fine 
robes and blazing jewels. They got so many 
prisoners that when they came back they would 
dump them into the slave-market to be sold for 
anything they might bring. If there were a poet 
among them, or a sculptor, or a philosopher, or a 
prophet, they would sell him for a sum that would 
not be sufficient to-day to buy a hat that a self- 
respecting woman would wear. Their only value 
lay in what could be got out of them at once. No- 
body seemed to think anything of what a man 
might become. Nobody had any faith in human 
possibilities. 

What a strange Being this was who came to tell 
people that they were worth while; who assured 
them that they were not animals (‘‘How much 
better is a man than a sheep?’’); that they were 
immortal spirits; that God was their Father; that 
they had a divine destiny; that the Father 
thought enough of them to send His Son to 
save them; that the Son thought enough of 
them to devote His life to them and then 
lay down His life for them. No wonder they 
looked at one another with amazement and ex- 
claimed, ‘‘Never man spake like this man.’’ Note 
how sane He was in His attitude toward them. He 


EARLY IMPRESSIONS OF JESUS 25 


had no illusions about humanity. He did not be- 
lieve that humanity was incurably good. He knew 
it was not incurably good. He was not impressed 
with people’s achievements, or with the way they 
lived or with the state of their hearts. Yet He 
believed in them. He believed in their possibili- 
ties. In other words, He believed in men as a> 
mother believes in her poor little freckled-faced, 
snub-nosed, knock-kneed boy. 


‘‘They said he would never amount to much, 
But his mother said he would.’’ 


Mother has no illusions about her boy. People 
say that love is blind, but it is not; only romance 
is blind. Mother believes in her boy, not because 
she is blind, but because love has opened her eyes 
to see what others fail to see. Others see the boy’s 
achievements or his failure to achieve; Mother 
sees his possibilities. She knows that her boy is 
freckle-faced and snub-nosed and knock-kneed, 
but she looks down beneath all these surface-ugli- 
nesses, deep down to his tiny, undeveloped spirit, 
and catches a vision of the Divine Finger touch- 
ing it. She sees it starting into life, sees it grow- 
ing on up, up, up, and looking up, herself, into the 
invisible she sees the child of her faith standing 
upon the heights of the Kingdom of God, a full- 
grown son of God, the Master’s image in his face. 
So Jesus looks upon us. He is not impressed with 
what we have come to be, but He is profoundly im- 
pressed with what we may come to be by and by. 


26 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


Not long ago I received a letter from a precious 
girl who was being tried in the fire as gold is tried. 
‘‘T am so glad,’’ she wrote, ‘‘that you found me 
when you did. I had lost my grip. And you came 
to me and said that you believed in me. And 
when you went away I said to myself, ‘There’s a 
man who believes in me, and I am going to make 
myself worthy of his faith in me.’ ”’ 

As I thought over that letter a sense of shame 
came over me. I had told that girl that I believed 
in her because she was a wonderful spirit who had 
already proved herself to be worthy of the faith 
of those who knew her. It was nothing for me to 
believe in her. And she was thanking me for it! 
And I thought, how different is the Master’s 
faith in us! We believe in people because of what 
they are, and when they fail, our ground of faith 
is gone, and we believe in them no more. Jesus 
believes in us for what we may become, and when 
we fail, the ground of His faith is still there, and 
He goes on believing in us still. 

When our hearts catch this appeal we are no 
longer concerned over the difficulties of faith 
which we encounter to-day. Difficulties or no dif- 
ficulties, when we realise that He believes in us 
we are going to believe in Him. And we are not 
going to stop with mere believing; we are going 
back to our work with a great passion-awakening 
ambition. We are going to say: ‘‘There is One 
who believes in me, and by His help I am going to 
be worthy of His faith in me.”’ 


IT 


CLEARING THE WAY FOR A VIEW OF 
JESUS IN THE GOSPELS 


I 


\ N 7 shall get other glimpses of Jesus in 

real life, but let us now turn to the pic- 

ture we have of Him in the Gospels. 

Before we open the Bible, however, it is important 

that we should come to an understanding. This 

is always essential where two or more persons 

approach the Bible together, for without a com- 

mon aim and, in some degree, a common point of 

view, we shall find little but confusion and diffi- 
culties for our pains. 

Let us agree at the outset that we will not con- 
cern ourselves about any question that is not 
bound up with our general aim. We want to get 
a clear, satisfying vision of the real Jesus—a 
vision that will enable us to cast ourselves upon 
him as our divine Lord and Saviour and Life-giver 
and Guide in perfect trust for to-day, for to-mor- 
row and forever. If we would keep this aim in 
view, we must rid our minds of most of the re- 
ligious questions which Christians have been 
thinking about for the last ten years. For exam- 


ple, we must dismiss this widespread notion that 
27 


28 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


we must do something to check the present decline 
of faith in Christianity. We are not concerned 
just now about Christianity; we are concerned 
about Christ. To be perfectly frank, I am not 
sure that there has been any decline of faith in 
Christianity. I see many evidences of a decline of 
faith in some things which have been mistaken for 
Christianity, and for these evidences I am pro- 
foundly grateful. But I am not sure that there is 
any less faith, to-day, among people who know 
what real Christianity is when they see it, than 
there was, let us say, twenty years ago. 

As for the supposed change in the attitude of 
the outside world toward our religion, I think we 
Christians have been taking our critics too seri- 
ously. We have accepted without question and 
have repeated with them ever since the war, the 
solemn assurance they gave us during the war, 
that the world has lost faith in Christianity, when, 
as a matter of fact, we know that the world did 
not have any to lose. As I have said, there is 
among church people a decline of faith in some 
things we have mistaken for Christianity, but 
neither in the Church nor in the outside world 
do I find any evidence of the often-reported 
growing disappointment in real Christianity. 
People who have never come in actual touch with 
real Christianity have never expected anything 
of it, while those who have come in actual touch 
with it still believe as earnestly as ever in the real 
thing they came in touch with. For instance, the 


CLEARING THE WAY 29 


man of the world who professes to have lost faith 
in Christianity still admits, when you question 
him, that he has faith in the Christianity he saw 
in his mother, or in a certain neighbour who so 
bravely stood by him in his greatest trouble. 

What we are concerned about just now is not 
the reported loss of faith in Christianity either in 
the Church or in the outside world, but the actual 
decline of faith in the Person who is the only 
source of the life that makes real Christianity pos- 
sible. 

Learned agnostics assure us that this loss of 
faith in the deity of Jesus is but the natural and 
necessary result of the progress of modern intel- 
ligence. Science, we are informed, will let us hold 
on to a human Jesus, but it will not allow us to 
believe in a divine Christ. (A professor in a 
Christian college was recently reported as say- 
ing to his class that at the present rate of prog- 
ress in scientific intelligence, nobody in America 
will believe that Jesus is divine, twenty years 
from now.) On the other hand, we have learned 
believers who are equally sure that the decline is 
due to the lack of scientific intelligence among 
Christians. The modern Christian, they tell us, 
is losing his faith in Jesus because both the pulpit 
and the pew lack the scholarship that is necessary 
to formulate a belief about Him that will har- 
monise with the demands of science. I confess I 
have been unable to find any evidence that either 
is right. It is easy to hold such theories in one’s 


30 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


library, but if you attempt to take them out into 
Jife you will experience some rude shocks. 

When I talk with an intelligent man who 
imagines that he has been compelled to give up 
his faith in Jesus because of the developments of 
modern intelligence, I usually find that he did not 
give it up at all, but that it gradually passed away 
under influences of which he was not conscious. 
And when I talk with an unlearned man who has 
lost his faith in Jesus I usually find that he has 
had a similar experience. The modern man may 
keep away from Jesus for intellectual reasons, but 
he does not turn away from Him for intellectual 
reasons. Aside from the blinding power of sin, 
the greatest enemy to faith to-day is to be found 
in our modern civilisation. People are losing 
their faith in Jesus mainly because they have been 
losing their sense of His reality, and they have 
been losing their sense of His reality because 
modern science (quite unintentionally) has pro- 
duced a civilisation in which it is difficult to pre- 
serve a sense of the reality of anything that is 
beyond matter. Science has done so much to de- 
velop the material side of civilisation and the 
spiritual forces of the world have done so little 
to develop its spiritual side, that matter has 
reached a height where it practically overwhelms 
spirit. 

If this seems an exaggeration, start out to-day 
to lead a purely materialistic life and see how our 
civilisation will rally its forces to help you. And 


CLEARING THE WAY 31 


then—say, to-morrow morning—start out to lead 
a spiritual life, or simply to get at the truth about 
a thing of the spirit, and see how it will rally its 
forces to hinder you. You may reply that our 
present civilisation is providing us with more 
means to do good than the race ever had before. 
This is true. Never were the means to help pro- 
vided with such a lavish hand. Our civilisation 
builds a railway track to the needy, builds a mod- 
ern freight train on it, and fills forty cars with 
supplies. But it puts no fire in the locomotive, no 
steam in the boiler. On the contrary, if you strike 
a match to start a fire, ten to one it will blow 
it out. Civilisation’s supply train is like a man 
who has enough wealth to feed a million human 
beings, but is without enough passion for human- 
ity in his heart to feed one. Not until the spark 
of heavenly fire finds its way into his heart will 
anything happen. Our civilisation deals only in 
things. It puts the means in our hands, but it puts 
no motive in our hearts—no divine passion, no 
Good Samaritan. At best it gives us a chance to 
play now and then at being Good Samaritans; but 
it doesn’t make us Good Samaritans. Indeed, it 
begins to put obstacles in our way the moment we 
betray a desire to become Good Samaritans. 


Ir 


A hundred years ago the world was far more 
selfish than it is now, but it was nothing like as 


32 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


greedy. We are never greedy for the things we 
know we can never get, and in those days the 
luxuries and comforts of life were so far beyond 
the reach of the average man that he hardly gave 
them a thought. He left them to kings and the 
few rich men who owned the kings, and his mind 
and heart were free for other things. But soon 
modern science began to make luxuries and com- 
forts which far excelled anything that kings had 
ever dreamed of, and at a cost which made it pos- 
sible for the average man to hope to get them, and 
soon the whole civilised world started off on a 
mad rush for them. And this frenzy for things, 
things, things, turned our civilisation into a wild, 
furious, blinding, deafening maelstrom of ma- 
terial activities, material pleasures, material pos- 
sessions, and in this maelstrom the average man 
of to-day spends all his days and half of his nights 
so completely submerged in matter that the eyes 
of his soul never have a chance. No wonder he 
loses his sense of the reality of spirit. 

Our modern civilisation not only magnifies mat- 
ter at the expense of spirit, but it has made so 
many things to make the world go faster that it is 
now going at a rate which destroys the sense of 
proportion of all who yield to its demand and go 
along with it. And when a man loses his sense 
of proportion he loses all sense of spiritual values, 
for the reason that he takes the light things of 
life seriously and the serious things of life lightly. 
If I were asked what has impressed me most, in 


CLEARING THE WAY 33 


my travels over this continent, I should say that it 
is the fact that the average American, whatever 
he may really feel, does not show half as much 
concern over keeping his home full of love as he 
does over keeping his automobile tank full of gas. 
Since he became a victim of hurry, or the illusion 
of hurry, he has lost his sense of proportion, and 
now takes the light things of life seriously and 
the serious things of life lightly. When we realise 
how large a proportion of the American people is 
in this state of mind we do not wonder that the 
name that is oftenest upon the lips of the average 
Christian is not the name of Him who for nearly 
two thousand years we have declared to be our 
only hope, but the name of our most famous foot- 
ball player. 

Moreover, the hurry that has been brought 
about by the over-development of the material side 
of our civilisation is a deadly enemy to spiritual 
comradeship, without which we never come in 
touch with anything that is of the spirit, whether 
the Great Spirit or the spirits of the loved ones He 
has given us. Just what this means I shall try to 
bring out in one of the following chapters. 

But this is not all. Our civilisation has turned 
its back upon the only kind of thinking in which it 
is possible to use our spiritual vision and, there- 
fore, to grasp anything that is of the spirit. Our 
fathers, whose wisdom we moderns have taken 
for our best joke, had two kinds of thinking—the 
kind they did when they were trying to get at the 


34 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


facts about matter, which we call scientific or 
laboratory thinking, and the kind they did when 
they were trying to get at the truths of the spirit, 
which our fathers knew as quiet-hour thinking or 
meditation. In scientific thinking one makes use 
of one’s physical and intellectual eyes only; in 
quiet-hour thinking or meditation one depends 
largely upon his spiritual vision. It would seem 
that common sense would demand that when we 
are trying to get at the facts about matter we 
should use the scientific method, and that when we 
are trying to get at the truth about things of the 
spirit we should use the quiet-hour method, and 
this used to be a commonly-accepted rule. 

But a generation ago, the achievements of sci- 
ence through the laboratory method grew to such 
startling proportions that the world lost its head 
over them and jumped to the conclusion that labo- 
ratory or scientific thinking was the only true 
thinking; and many scholars of the church, falling 
into this illusion, dropped the quiet hour out of 
their lives and undertook to think their way 
through the Bible and the religious problems of 
the time by the laboratory method. In other 
words they turned their backs upon the only 
thinking in which the spirit is given a chance to 
grasp the things of the spirit and undertook to 
study religion, which is a thing of the spirit, by a 
method which was designed only for the investi- 
gation of ite and makes no use of the spiritual 
vision whatever. 


CLEARING THE WAY 35 


Here, then, are three gigantic obstacles which 
our modern civilisation has unwittingly thrown 
in the way of the man who would like to get at the 
truth about anything that is of the spirit—about 
the Great Spirit, about the divine spirit of Jesus, 
about the spirits of our fellow men, about any- 
thing that is beyond matter: 

First, the overwhelming materialism of our 
everyday life, which gives us a chance to use our 
physical and intellectual vision, but no chance to 
use our spiritual vision. 

Second, the frightful speed developed by fast 
machinery and the ever-growing greed for things 
—a speed which not only destroys our sense of 
proportion and leaves us to take the serious 
things of life lightly and the light things of life 
seriously, but cheats us out of the quiet moments 
of life—the only moments which we can devote 
to spiritual comradeship and thus keep us in vital 
touch with the Spirit of God on the one hand and 
the spirits of our fellow-men on the other. 

Third, the illusion developed by the wonderful 
achievements of science that it is only by scientific 
thinking that we can hope to get at the truth of 
anything that exists, whether matter or spirit. 

Any one of these obstacles is big enough to shut 
out our vision of God, our vision of the divine in 
Jesus, our vision of anything that is of the spirit, 
and with all three in the way, I can see but one 
chance for the modern man who really wants to 


36 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


know the truth about anything that is eternally 
worth while. 

Here and there one comes upon a man of re- 
markable spiritual power and vision. He is 
strong enough for his job and his vision seems to 
sweep the horizon of the universe. You instine- 
tively feel that he knows God; that he is in vital 
touch with the God we have been seeking in the 
face of Jesus Christ; that he is also in touch with 
the spirits of his fellow-men; that it is through 
his vital touch with God in Christ on the one hand 
that he receives the strength which he is so ef- 
fectively using in ministering to the follow-men 
with whom he is in touch on the other. Talk with 
these rare men and you will find that every one of 
them has the same secret. Every one of them 
regularly pulls himself out of this wild, blinding 
whirlpool we call our everyday life and seeks a 
quiet spot where he can empty his mind and heart 
of every material thing, take his bearings, restore 
his mental and spiritual balance, give his spiritual 
vision the same chance in the world of spirit that 
he has been giving his physical and intellectual 
vision in the world of matter, and stays there un- 
til Christ has become real to him, until his sense 
of the reality of spirit has again become as 
strong as his sense of the reality of matter. These 
men have found the only way known by which the 
modern man can give his soul a chance. 

This suggests the method I wish to follow in 
our present quest. I simply ask you to seek with 


CLEARING THE WAY 37 


me a quiet place apart from the blinding and 
deafening materialities of our everyday life, 
where our spiritual vision will have as good a 
chance as our physical and intellectual vision, and 
think with me about Jesus, not in the way we 
would think to get at the material facts about the 
human Jesus, but in the only way in which we 
ean hope to get at the truth about the real Jesus 
—the only way in which we can become conscious 
of the divine Christ in Jesus. 

Let me add that it is useless for us to seek a 
quiet place for this task if we are not going to 
leave behind us the things which make quiet think- 
ing impossible. Above all, we must leave behind 
us the spirit of controversy and the critical habit 
that is usually associated with it. I am aware 
that there are still good people in the world who 
believe that controversy is a good thing. They 
tell us that it clears the atmosphere so that we can 
see better. But I have been out in the Southwest 
where they have tornadoes, and I have found that 
a tornado clears the atmosphere wonderfully, so 
that we can see better, but—it doesn’t leave us 
much to see! 


Tit 


Another matter about which we need to have at 
least a working agreement is the Bible itself. Ido 
not mean to intimate that Christian students can, 
or ever will come to an agreement about the Bible. 
But they can come to a working agreement. If 


38 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


we are going to get a clear conception of the real 
Jesus of the Gospels we must at least agree that 
when we.study Jesus in the Gospels, it should be 
in full view of the fact that He exists outside of 
the Gospels. We can hardly imagine that even 
Paul could have seen Jesus very clearly, what- 
ever he might have learned in a book, if he had 
never come upon Him in his experience. Fifty 
years ago, our poverty-stricken schools made a 
desperate effort to teach science apart from ex- 
periment. The result was pathetic: the average 
boy grew up with the idea that chemistry was a 
book. The only pupils who got a real vision of 
chemistry were the pupils of a few zealous teach- 
ers who managed, with the aid of a crude bit of 
home-made apparatus, to do a little experiment- 
ing on their own account. We have had the same 
experience in our religious teaching. All through 
the history of the Church the teachers of religion 
who succeeded in giving men a real vision of Jesus 
were those who taught what they learned of Him 
in the Gospels along with what they learned of 
Him in experiment or experience. If we attempt 
to learn the Jesus of the Gospels by studying them 
apart from experience, we are not likely to get a 
much better vision of Him than the pupils of fifty 
years ago, who were taught chemistry apart from 
experiment, got of chemistry. Jesus is in the Gos- 
/ pels, but He is something more, infinitely more, 
than the contents of a book. If we would get a 
clear picture of him in the Gospels we must re- 


CLEARING THE WAY 39 


mind ourselves that He is bigger than the Gospels, 
that His existence does not depend upon the 
Gospels, and that however highly we may think of 
the story of Jesus—and we cannot think too 
highly of it—the fate of Jesus is in no sense bound 
up with it. Let us not forget, that if we exalt the 
story of Jesus above Jesus, we shall have to give 
up His deity or divinity, for to be divine is to be 
self-existent, and it is impossible to conceive of 
Him as self-existent and at the same time make 
Him dependent upon something that is not self- 
existent. 

It is also important to bear in mind that we 
cannot help those who join us in this quest, to get 
a clear conception of the Jesus of the Gospels if 
we insist upon foreing their minds through the 
same channel by which we have found Him. It is 
so easy to feel that our way is the logical way and 
that the logical way is the only right way. But 
neither is true. I shall probably be called illogical 
because I shall ask you to consider my reasons 
for believing in the Jesus of the Bible without 
first giving you my reasons for believing in the 
Bible. But we humans are not logical. When we 
are bent on finding the truth, we don’t confine our- 
selves to the logical channel; if we don’t find it by 
that route we try to reach it the other way round. 

I realise that we are living in a day in which it 
is much easier to get a man to believe in Jesus 
first and in the Bible afterwards, than it is to get 
him to believe in the Bible first and in Jesus after- 


40 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


wards; and if I find an earnest inquirer who is not 
sure about the Bible I say nothing to him about 
the logical way. I know that many men who could 
not find their way to Him by that route have found 
it the other way round, and so I say to him: ‘‘You 
have a sufficiently good opinion of the Bible to try 
to find out about Jesus in the Gospels. Drop the 
problem of believing in the Bible for the present 
and fix your mind upon the problem of believing 
in Jesus. Learn of Him in the Gospels, and when 
you come to believe in Him you will say, ‘I don’t 
believe in Jesus because I believe in the Bible; I 
believe in the Bible because I believe in Jesus.’ ”’ 

After all, does anyone ever believe very deeply 
in the Bible until he comes to believe in the Jesus 
of the Bible? Here is a book which claims to be 
an authority on bread. You and I, let us say, were 
brought up in a tropical country where people use 
bananas for bread. We don’t know bread. Now 
we may read this book a hundred times, and how- 
ever strongly it may appeal to our reason, if we 
never use bread we shall never be sure whether it 
is an authority or not. Not until we make a faith- 
ful use of bread and study its effects sufficiently 
to know just what it does for us, and then turn to 
this book and discover that it confirms our ex- 
perience, shall we be sure that it is the authority 
it claims to be. So it is with the Bible, which we 
accept as an authority on Him who is the Bread 
of Life. We may persuade ourselves that we be- 
lieve in it, but the question of its authority is 


CLEARING THE WAY 41 


never really settled in our minds until we have 
made a faithful use of the Bread of Life which it 
offers us and then turn to the Book to find that it 
agrees with our experience. 

Many a man who has never been able to satisfy 
himself with the usual arguments for the truth or 
inspiration of the Bible has been amazed to find, 
when he came to believe in Jesus, that he needed 
no argument. It needs no logic to prove that a 
human being, unaided by Heaven, could never 
have given us a picture of the divine Christ. 

After all, the real problem ag to the Bible to- 
day, is not the problem of getting men to believe 
in it, but the problem of getting them to approach 
it from a point of view that will enable them to 
see that it is worthy of belief. 


IV 


For years I accepted the Bible not for what I 
saw in it, but for what I thought I ought to see in 
it. What I actually saw I would hardly admit, 
even to myself. To this day it is humiliating to 
me to confess, even to myself, that while the great 
and the good of all the Christian ages had seen 
wonderful things in it, I had seen little but trou- 
ble. Fortunately for me there came a brighter 
day. 

T did not learn much in my university days, but 
I learned two things which I would not part with 
for the world. And I did not get them out of a 


42 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


book: they were only two bits of practical advice 
picked uv in the classroom. One of them came 
from that dear old professor of English literature 
whom I have referred to as the best man I have 
ever known—‘‘Old Mang.’’ 

For several weeks we had been studying 
Shakespeare’s Hamlet—that is to say, we had 
been analysing it. We had analysed it down to 
the last line, the last phrase, the last word. We 
had analysed it to death. In all this ‘‘Old Mang’’ 
had followed the rules; but when he closed the 
book he gave us a word of his own. 

‘“‘Now, young gentlemen,’’ he said, ‘‘you are 
prepared to read Hamlet.’’ 

We boys sighed. It was a very audible sigh. 
‘“‘Old Mang’’ smiled and went on: ‘‘Some fine 
afternoon, put your Hamlet in your pocket and go 
out mto the country for a walk. Stroll around 
through the woods and fields until your mind has 
emptied itself of every material interest and 
thought; then lie down under a tree on the edge of 
the wood where you can look up at the sky. Now 
be still. Be still until you have fallen under the 
spell of the stillness. Then take your Hamlet out 
of your pocket and read it. Don’t study it, don’t 
analyse it, don’t pause over a difficult word; just 
read it; read it rapidly; drink it down in great 
gulps, with no purpose whatever but just to get 
at the soul of it. And then you will begin to know 
Hamlet.’’ 

I did not try ‘‘Old Mang’s”’ advice with Hamlet 


CLEARING THE WAY 43 


—I was tired of Hamlet; but some years after- 
wards, I began to try it with my Bible, and I made 
what was to me a wonderful discovery. I found 
that a book—not a mere mass of information, but 
a message to men—is like a man, in that it has a 
soul as well as a body; and that just as you can 
dissect a man’s body down to the last atom and 
miss his soul, so you can analyse a book down to 
the last word and utterly miss its soul—its mes- 
sage to your own soul. Also I found that if one 
approaches the story of Jesus with his intellect 
- alone, he may get at all the material facts about 
the human Jesus, but he will never get at the truth 
about the spirit of Jesus; he will never come to 
know the divine Christ. 

This of course was nothing new. Science 
teaches us to-day that we can only grasp like with 
hke, matter with matter, mind with mind. The 
brilliant scientific philosopher Bergson has gone 
so far as to assert that pure intellect, being ma- 
terial, is unable to grasp anything that is beyond 
matter, and if there is anything beyond matter 
we shall have to find something else with which 
to grasp it. I cannot pull a thought out of my 
mind with a pair of dentist’s forceps; neither can 
I pick up a pair of dentist’s forceps with my 
mind. 

I cannot get at a scientific fact, which is a ma- 
terial thing, with the means which I use to get at 
a spiritual truth; neither can a scientist get at a 


44 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


spiritual truth by the means which he uses to get 
at a material fact. 

And long before the days of science Jesus 
taught us the very same thing. He said to the 
Samaritan woman: ‘‘You think that to worship 
God—to get in touch with God—you must go to 
that material temple on the hill yonder and use 
certain material forms. You are mistaken: God 
is a spirit, and they that worship Him, must wor- 
ship Him in spirit—with their spirits.’’ Later, 
when Peter fervently declared that Jesus was the 
Son of God, the Master said to him: ‘‘Flesh and 
blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my 
Father who is in heaven.’’ The truth had not 
come to Peter as a material fact would have come, 
from a material source, by material means. It 
was a spiritual truth and it had come to his spirit 
from spirit, from the Great Spirit himself. And 
Paul, following Jesus, taught the same truth. 
‘““These things,’’ he said in writing about the 
things of the spirit, ‘‘are spiritually discerned, or 
measured, or grasped; you see them with the eyes 
of your spirit.’’ 

Here was a great fundamental truth as old as 
the hills—a truth taught by religion and con- 
firmed by science so far as it relates to its own 
sphere. Yet I, who had been taught by both re- | 
ligious and scientific teachers, had never so much 
as caught a hint of it. 

But I did not fully realise its significance, and 
as a consequence I did not fully realise the value 


CLEARING THE WAY 45 


of ‘‘Old Mang’s’’ advice until I had that tragical 
experience of which I have spoken, which gave me 
a new view of life and as a consequence gave me 
anew Bible. When I realised that the real values 
of life are spiritual and that the material side is 

only incidental, it dawned upon me that just as I 
had been magnifying the material side of life 
above the spiritual I had been magnifying the 
material side of the Bible above the spiritual. 
The next moment it occurred to me that practi- 
cally all the difficulties about the Bible which had 
troubled me were about its material side—the in- 
cidental side—and that because I had habitually 
magnified the material side of life I had been 
magnifying the material difficulties of the Bible. 

I had done this so much that when I went to the 
Old Testament, where most of them are to be 
found, they would immediately begin to crowd 
around me, and soon they would shut out every- 
thing else from my vision. That horrible story of 
the two bears that ate up the forty-two children 
would loom up so big before me that I could not 
get a glimpse of God or His truth anywhere. 
When I opened the little Book of Jonah I could 
see nothing but that big fish. And the longer I 
looked at it the bigger it grew; it grew so big that 
it completely hid the whole message of the book 
from my eyes. For years that book was nothing 
to me but a fish story. But when my eyes were 
opened to a new vision of life and I came to the 
book realising that all real values are spiritual 


46 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


and that the material is only incidental—when I 
was no longer obsessed with exaggerated ideas of 
the importance of material facts, but unspeakably 
hungry for spiritual truth—for God’s message to 
my soul—in a word, when I opened this Book of 
Jonah looking for-the eternal verities of God, by 
the side of which the biggest fish is but a micro- 
scopic germ, the fish I saw didn’t frighten me a 
bit. I simply said: ‘‘Get out of my way; you are 
not half as frightful as I thought you were. I 
am not interested in you, anyway; I am interested 
in God. I[ want to know how God feels toward a 
poor fellow who forsakes Him and gets into a 
whale of a trouble and then repents. J want to 
know how God feels toward poor benighted 
heathen when their sins bring them to the verge of 
destruction and they wake up and become sorry.”’ 
And when I had ‘‘shooed’’ the big fish away I 
picked up the little book and simply drank it in, 
just to get at the soul of it, just to get at the mind 
and spirit of God; and soon there came to me that 
wonderful vision of the infinite compassion of 
God for poor sinners—that wonderful vision 
which sets our hearts to singing— 


‘<There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, 
Like the wideness of the sea; 
There’s a kindness in His justice 
‘Which is more than liberty.”’ 


And that big fish hasn’t bothered me since. 


IIT 
BEHOLD THE MAN! 


I 


HAVE said that I was first led to believe in 

| Jesus by what I saw of Him outside of the 
Bible—in the lives of those in whom he lived, 
beginning with my mother. I now come to an- 
other reason. I believe in Him because of what I 
have learned of him inside of the Bible—rather, 
because of what I have learned of him in the Bible 
since I began to follow ‘‘Old Mang’s’’ advice. I 
had been content to analyse the Gospel-story, 
which was all right as far as it went. We must 
analyse the story or we shall never get at the 
material facts about the human Jesus. But if we 
never go further—if after analysing we do not 
take this story to a quiet place where we can turn 
our minds away from mere material facts, and 
synthesise it—grasp it as a whole to get at the 
soul of it—to get at and saturate ourselves with 
the mind and spirit of Jesus—we shall never get a 
vision of the divine Christ. So long as I was con- 
tent to seek material facts about Jesus I was con- 
tinually pausing to say, ‘‘How human! How won- 
derfully human!’’; but since I have learned to go 


further, while I still find myself impressed with 
AT 


48 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


his humanness, there are times when I catch a 
glimpse of something that brings me up with a 
jerk, and I open my eyes wide and exclaim, ‘‘ That 
is not human, that’s divine!”’ 


II 


Now let us imagine that we have been following 
‘“Old Mang’s’’ advice. We have brought the 
story of Jesus into a quiet place and have been 
synthesising it—just trying to grasp it as a whole, 
drinking it in to get at His mind and spirit. Now 
let us close the book. What do you see! I will 
tell you what I see: 

A great crowd is waiting at the roadside. The 
news came last night that the Teacher was on His 
way southward and would probably pass through 
the neighbourhood this morning. The whole 
eountry for miles around has turned out to meet 
Him—curious folk to gaze upon Him, heart-hun- 
ery folk to listen to Him, troubled folk bringing 
their sick and afflicted ones to be healed by Him. 
A few moments ago a passing traveller brought 
the news that he was just beyond the hill, and now 
all the people have stopped talking and are cran- 
ing their necks to catch the first glimpse of Him. 

And now He appears at the top of the hill. 
Everybody is so still you wonder if the people 
have stopped breathing. Just over there stands a 
mother with a sick baby that is resting its head 
upon her shoulder. At the sight of the great 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 49 


Teacher her heart gives a bound and she begins to 
tremble. Her first impulse is to run to meet Him, 
but something checks her. The moments drag, 
whole hours pass, it seems to her, and now He is 
near. 

‘‘Q Teacher,’’ she cries, ‘‘have pity on my poor 
little sick baby.’?’ And then she turns her back 
so that He can see its face. Its little chin is rest- 
ing heavily upon the mother’s shoulder. There 
is a deathly pallor on its face. Its little eyes are 
set in a glaze. Its little lips are pinched and 
parched. The Teacher pauses and without a word 
turns toward the little thing and places His hand 
gently upon its head. A light comes into the little 
eyes and they open wide to Him in a strange stare; 
the little lips part in a faint smile, there is a slight 
blush in its cheeks, and then the little thing ey 
cooes out its new-found joy. 

There is a gentle word to the mother and the 
Teacher passes on. A moment later he comes 
upon a little cripple boy leaning on two crooked 
sticks. He pauses and lays His hand upon his 
shoulder. The little fellow looks up into the 
stranger’s face and suddenly becomes conscious 
of a great flood of life pouring down through his 
little body, down through his little withered legs; 
and dropping his crooked sticks he impulsively 
kisses the Stranger’s hand and darts off to tell his 
friends what has happened. 

We leave Him just here and go on our way; but 
a few days later we come upon Him again. It is 


50 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


in the freshness of early morning. The air is 
balmy and mellow, and the sunbeams are dancing 
like fairies upon the dewdrops on the grass. The 
sky is as blue asa baby’s eyes. He is sitting upon 
a hillside feasting His eyes upon a glorious scene 
stretched out before Him. The fields as far ag His 
eyes can reach are carpeted with beautiful flowers, 
white and purple and crimson and gold, and 
through the heavens are darting here and there 
happy birds, leaving the echo of their sweet music 
behind them. 

Now He turns and looks into the faces of a 
group of friends who have gathered around Him, 
and it is easy to see that His heart has filled up 
with pity. Never before has He seen a contrast 
so strange and so painful. In the outstretched 
landscape He has seen beauty, peace, joy, content- 
ment; but the faces before Him are seamed with 
anxiety and care, and the eyes that should reflect 
the calm of heaven are filled with pitiful yearn- 
ing and vague foreboding. 

And now He is speaking. ‘‘Dear friends,’’ He 
is saying gently, ‘‘why are your hearts so trou- 
bled? Why do you consume your souls with anx- 
ious care? Look at those birds. Do they fly as 
if they carried a burden on their hearts? Listen 
to their sweet music. Do you hear one anxious 
note? Do they wear out their hearts with fear for 
the morrow? ‘They do not even toil for a living 
and yet your Father feeds them. If God cares for 
the birds that do not toil, will He not care for His 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 51 


own children who labour so hard all the day long 
for their daily bread?’’ 

And thus He talks on so beautifully, so calmly 
of the Father’s loving care, until at last a strange 
light comes into His listeners’ faces, and a strange 
peace into their hearts; for never has a man 
spoken to men that way before. 

Again He goes on His way and we follow Him. 
Presently He comes upon a father who is broken- 
hearted over his boy. And His heart goes out to 
him and He heals his boy. (Father, are you 
broken-hearted over your boy?) It reminds us of 
something we saw ‘Him do in another place. A 
father came to Him broken-hearted over his 
daughter. He went with him to his home and in 
the upper room stood before the white, still form 
of a beautiful girl. And His heart went out to her 
and He reached out His hands to her and said— 
not in the cold, formal words of our translation, 
‘Maiden, arise,’’ but with a strange tenderness, 
—‘‘Tiattle darling, get up.’’ 

Again we come upon Him as he is speaking to a 
great crowd gathered before Him. It is a weary 
throng of hard-pressed, hard-driven men whose 
backs are almost broken under the burdens of life. 
Now He pauses, and as a mother would stretch 
out her arms to a little weary child and say, 
““Come to mother,’’ the Teacher stretches out 
His arms to that weary crowd and says, ‘‘Come 
unto Me. Come unto Me and I will give you rest.’’ 

He talks on and our hearts are filled with a 


42 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


strange yearning, and you say to me, ‘‘Let us see 
if we can get nearer to Him so that we can get a 
better view of His face.’’ And we elbow our way 
through the crowd and now we are standing 
within a few yards of Him. What do you see? 

After the generation that saw Jesus in the flesh 
had passed away His followers became curious to 
know something of His personal appearance. The 
Early Christian Fathers, recalling the picture of 
the Messiah in Isaiah—‘‘He hath no form nor 
comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no 
beauty that we should desire him’’—took the de- 
scription literally and decided that Jesus was 
physically very unattractive. A very ancient 
imaginative picture gives him a very homely face. 
(It is significant, however, that as you look at it it 
becomes strangely attractive.) Of course, as 
every Bible student knows, the prophet’s picture 
is not a picture of the person of Jesus at all; it is 
a picture of the Messiah in his character as Mes- 
siah. What the prophet is saying is that when 
the Messiah comes He will be so different (in his 
character, mission and work) from what they ex- 
pect and want, that they will find nothing attrac- 
tive in Him. 

We know nothing of the features of Jesus ex- 
cept his eyes, but I am sure that He was not ugly 
and for avery simple reason. Bring the meanest, 
most repulsive-looking man in the community to 
Christ, get him to open his whole being to Christ 
until he is thoroughly saturated with His spirit, 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 53 


and it will not be a month before people will begin 
to say: ‘‘I used to think that man was horribly 
ugly, but he doesn’t seem to be at all ugly now.’’ 
We have found that the greatest beautifier in the 
world is love, and believing as I do that Jesus was 
Love Incarnate, it is impossible for me to imagine 
that He was unattractive. 

Wipe out Isaiah’s picture from your mind and 
think a moment. Let the scenes in the Master’s 
life we have just recalled pass in review before 
your mental vision. Now let us look at Him 
again. What do you see? To me it is the most 
satisfying face I have ever looked upon. Where 
have I ever seen anything like it? So pure, so 
gentle, so strong; so full of light, and love, and 
dignity, and poise, and peace! And when have I 
ever heard such a voice? So sweet, so tender, so 
mellow with sympathy; musical as the waters of 
a mountain brook, yet so firm, so steady, so brave! 


III 


I have said that nothing is told us of any of 
His features except His eyes. I do not wonder 
at that; the Gospel writers were trying to help us 
see His soul, and the eyes, as we have long been 
saying, are the windows of the soul. You have 
doubtless noticed that they were deeply impressed 
by the way He had of using His eyes. He did not 
look at people in a casual way. ‘The word ex- 
presses the idea of a deep, fixed, intense gaze. 


54 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


Quick as He was to note every sign of suffering, 
He had the searching gaze of one who is seeking 
to get down beneath the surface to the souls of 
men. Someone has said that if Jesus should walk 
down Broadway to-day he would be deeply inter- 
ested in our sky-scrapers. The Jesus I see in the 
Gospels is not like that. He came to seek and to 
save that which was lost, and if He were walking 
down Broadway to-day, He would probably be so 
busy looking through the eyes of men for the lost 
that he would hardly compliment us by looking up 
at our sky-scrapers. 

Here comes a young man in great haste and 
drops upon his knees before Him. He has money 
and no doubt the little money-bag that Treasurer 
Judas is carrying 1s almost empty; but the whole 
interest of Jesus is immediately centred upon his 
soul. ‘‘And Jesus looking upon him’’—the old 
version says ‘‘beholding him,’’ but the word 
means that He was looking at him with an intense, 
soul-searching gaze. And when His eyes caught 
a glimpse of the young man’s soul He—‘‘loved 
hima)” 

He is always looking at men in that soul-search- 
ing way. He has a peculiar habit of pausing when 
He is about to say or do something of unusual im- 
portance—something with which He wants to 
reach the consciences of men—and turning to the 
man on His extreme right and searching His eyes 
with that same intense gaze, and then passing on 
to the next and the next until He has gone round. 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 55 


It is an intense moment. I can see Him as His 
eyes go from one to another, His gaze piercing 
through their eyes to their souls. And then their 
consciences are beginning to stir. Nothing else is 
stirring. Everything is so still people are afraid 
to breathe. And now— 

‘*And when he had looked round about upon 
them all, he said—.’’ 

Notice His way of touching people. In ana- 
lysing the Gospels you may guess, as some have 
done, that it is a touch of magic; but if you will 
read the whole story in the way I have suggested, 
you will realise that nothing could be further 
from the truth, and you are likely to conclude that 
in most cases it is simply a touch of sympathy. 
When you go to see a sick man who is not suffer- 
ing or having a hard time in other ways, you are 
satisfied to shake hands with him. But if itis a 
pitiful case—one that pulls hard upon your heart- 
strings—you are just bound to touch him. You 
lay your hand upon his shoulder, and if you are 
encouraged to go further, you will lay it gently 
upon his brow. 

Notice His way of speaking. He is so differ- 
ent. Other rabbis are so harsh, so bitter, and 
have such superior airs, that it is a cross to listen 
to them. Jesus not only has something good to 
say, but He has a wonderfully charming way of 
saying it. ‘‘And the people wondered at the 
gracious words which proceeded from his lips.’’ 
The word apparently expresses the idea of grace- 





56 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


filled words gracefully or graciously uttered. The 
people were carried away with His winsome Wisin’ 
of talking. 

Apparently He spoke with an almost reveal 
ble magnetism. This, at any rate, is the simplest 
explanation of some unusual things that hap- 
pened in His audiences now and then. Watch that 
mother standing on the outskirts of the crowd 
with her baby in her arms. It is a public gather- 
ing and vublic gatherings are men’s affairs; the 
women should stay at home! But the women come 
with their babies and little children and stand on 
the outskirts of the crowd and gaze upon the won- 
derful Teacher and strain their ears to catch 
every word. There are tears in the mother’s eyes, 
and now her lips are moving, and unconscious of 
the people around her she is saying quite aloud to 
herself: ‘‘Oh! I want Him to put His hand on my 
baby’s head.’’ 

But it is a man’s affair and she must not in- 
trude. All the same, a moment later, hardly con- 
scious of what she is doing, she is pressing slowly 
through the crowd. People begin talking about 
her, but she does not hear; her eyes are fixed upon 
His face. And she presses onward until—but it’s 
a familiar story. 

‘‘Get back there! This is no place for women 
and children.’’ And her heart sinks within her. 
But the Teacher intervenes and a moment later 
the baby is sitting in the crook of His left arm, 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 57 


and now He is laying His right hand gently upon 
its little head. 

In like manner a poor woman of the street— 
but this, too, is a familiar story. 

And now He ceases to speak and rises to His 
feet. Instantly the people begin to crowd forward 
with their sick and lame and blind, and there is 
great confusion. There is confusion everywhere 
except immediately around Him. There is some- 
thing in His face that calms the hearts of people, 
and there is a strange calm as He moves quietly 
among them. There is a word here, and a touch 
there, and the sick are well again, and the blind 
see and the lame walk! 


IV 


What impression does this strange scene make 
upon you? If you are very modern—whatever 
that may mean—you will say that you don’t think 
much of impressions; that to get at the truth 
about a thing we must steel ourselves against im- 
pressions and confine ourselves to the task of get- 
ting at the facts. But you have a very dear friend 
whose soul you have plumbed to the depths. Did 
you come to know him by that method? Have 
you ever come to know any man by that method? 

How are you impressed by these wonders which 
Jesus performs upon the bodies of men? When 
we take the story of a miracle out of its setting 
and undertake to analyse it, we practically put it 


58 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


under a microscope, for it becomes magnified in 
our minds and its difficulties are magnified with 
it. And naturally it does not make a very pleas- 
ant impression upon us. But we are not analysing 
now; we are simply taking these incidents as 
parts of the whole story, and we are not trying 
to settle questions about miracles; we are only 
trying to get at the mind and spirit of Jesus. 
Looking at these incidents in this way, how do 
they impress you? 

I will tell you how they impress me. When I 
am analysing the Gospels to get at the facts—the 
material facts—they seem utterly contrary to na- 
ture; but when I take these Gospels off to a quiet 
spot and read them with no aim but to get at His 
mind and spirit, I begin to think more about the 
divine Christ and less about the human Jesus, 
and when I think of these wonders as the acts of 
a divine Christ—a supernatural Christ—they no 
longer appear unnatural; they only appear super- 
natural—above natural. And I am satisfied. 
Why should I be disturbed over the supernatural 
deeds of One who is Himself supernatural? I 
cannot conceive of Jesus as divine and at the same 
time limit His knowledge and power to our human 
level. 

But just now, perhaps, you are in a questioning’ 
mood and nothing that you can think of about 
these physical miracles will satisfy you. What will 
you do? Will you turn your back upon Jesus be- 
cause you cannot accept the record of His mir- 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 59 


acles? Wait a moment: these are not all of His 
miracles; they are only His physical miracles. If 
you cannot accept the miracles which He performs 
on men’s bodies, why not take a look at the mir- 
acles which He performs on their souls? Have you 
any objection to His spiritual miracles? Look! 
Here comes a woman who a year ago was in a 
terrible fix. People said she was full of devils. 
They said that Mary Magdelene had seven 
demons; but they used seven as a complete num- 
ber and what they meant was, not that she had 
just seven devils, but that she was full of devils. 
(Perhaps you know somebody who is in that fix.) 
But look into her beautiful eyes, now. Would you 
call her a devil, or would you call her an angel? 

You say you cannot accept the miracles which 
Jesus performed on men’s bodies: here is a far 
greater miracle; how does this wonder impress 
you? You see no difficulty about it? And why? 

Is it because you have seen something like it 
with your own eyes? ‘‘Blessed are they that have 
not seen, and yet have believed.’’ 

If I may judge from my own experience there 
is no other point of view from which a man of 
modern intelligence can look upon the physical 
miracles of Jesus with any considerable degree 
of patience. So long as we confine ourselves to 
analysing the story of Jesus to get at the material 
facts, we never find these accounts of physical 
miracles pleasant reading; but when we take the 
story to a quiet place and undertake to get at the 


60 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


soul of it, these records of His wonder-working 
seldom give us any serious trouble; usually we 
are quite willing to hold on to them, just as they 
are, and wait for a day of better light. 


Vv 


But the question arises, Why did Jesus per- 
form these wonders? We are not facing this 
question very bravely to-day. For years we mod- 
erns have been trying to persuade ourselves that 
Jesus had the same idea of the value of physical 
comfort, and that He was concerned for the phys- 
to bravely face the fact that He did not—that He 
was supremely indifferent to His own physical 
comfort, and that He was concerned for the phys- 
ical comfort of others, only in so far as it affected 
their spiritual welfare. Jesus did not heal men’s 
bodies because He was impressed, as we are, with 
the value of bodies, but because He was impressed 
with the value of souls. He healed them, not 
that they might understand that He sympathised 
with them in their physical needs, but that they 
might understand that He sympathised with them 
in all their needs and might be encouraged to 
come to Him with their deepest needs. 

Catch the picture! This Man who speaks with 
infinite tenderness to the helpless—this man who 
is love itself, is a terror to all diseases, all demons, 
all evil things. He goes about overflowing with 
virtue; and before the virtue which goes out of 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 61 


Him evil spirits flee and all diseases vanish. No 
evil thing can stand in His presence. The powers 
of darkness struggle to keep their hold, but are 
forced into precipitate retreat. Death itself, at 
the sound of His voice, relinquishes its clammy 
grasp on its victim and is gone. And not once 
does He say, ‘‘Your case is hopeless; I can do 
nothing for you.’’ Every need is met. Every 
heart is satisfied. Everybody goes home happy. 

What is the secret of it all? There is but one 
word that accounts for the daily life of this Man 
who went about doing good. He is a lover. Al- 
ways His face shows an infinite, loving sympathy. 
Always His hand is gentle. Any other view of 
Him makes Him a hopeless mystery. He is not a 
magician. He is not a welfare-worker. He is not 
a health officer. He is a lover. 

Perhaps you will say, ‘‘I can’t see that. When 
I read the story I cannot see any difference be- 
tween Him and a benevolent physician going about 
and doing his work without pay.’’ Very well; but 
we can feel some things that we cannot see. Can 
you not feel the difference? J never made any 
progress in my efforts to get at the truth about 
the things of the spirit until I began to take note 
of the impressions which I received from them. 
For example: when I depended only upon what 
T could see, the story of Jesus driving the traders 
out of the Temple meant, either a feverish attempt 
at reform, or a sudden burst of bad temper. But 
when I learned to pause before it and consult my 


62 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


impressions I realised that it was neither. Jesus 
did not drive out those desecrators with the hope 
of purifying the Temple-worship. Nor was it an 
outburst of bad temper. He did it because He 
could not look upon the desecration of His 
Father’s house without giving vent to His indig- 
nation and without rebuking the desecrators. No 
man was so perfectly self-composed as Jesus, yet 
the sight of sin stirred His soul to the depths. 
Now He was grieved, now He was tremendously 
indignant. He did not often give vent to His in- 
dignation, but it was easy to see that He was never 
indifferent. He could not be indifferent. The Son 
of God, purer than a sunbeam, could no more look 
upon sin with indifference than a refined woman 
could be indifferent to the accumulation of dust 
and cobwebs in her home. 

Sometimes we ask ourselves why God gave us 
this horrible temper of ours, when we have no 
use for it and must spend half of our time in try- 
ing to hold it down. Well, God did not give us a 
horrible temper. He gave us a great wealth of 
feeling, an overpowering current which He in- 
tended that we should direct, now into the channel 
of love, now into the channel of zeal, now into the 
channel of indignation—a current which if prop- 
erly directed would make us a power for good in 
the world; and instead of directing it into the 
proper channels we allow it to turn off into the 
channel of hate. Or, to change the figure, God 
gave us great engines of love, and zeal, and in- 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 63 


dignation with which to bring great things to 
pass in the world, and we have allowed our evil 
nature to tap the pipe and draw off our ‘‘temper’’ 
into a destructive engine of our own making. The 
picture of Jesus cleansing the Temple is a picture 
of an overflowing current of feeling directed into 
a right channel. 

So long as we only ask, ‘‘What do I see?’’ we 
are continually missing the truth about Jesus. 
We see Him eating with publicans and sinners 
and we decide that there must be something wrong 
with our ideas of sin; evidently Jesus was fond of 
sinners. But when we pause long enough to look 
into His face as He is eating with them and note 
the impression that face makes upon us, we come 
to an entirely different conclusion. Elsewhere I 
have referred to a rare spirit I knew in my uni- 
versity days—‘‘Old Mang.’’ I believe I said that 
I never knew a nobler soul. His heart was firm; 
his life was blameless; he was a walking sermon 
of goodness to the entire community. And yet he 
was often found in company with the worst boys 
at the university. If I had merely followed my 
eyes I should have said that ‘‘Old Mang’ did not 
hate sin as a Christian is supposed to hate it. If 
one saw him walking through the campus with a 
boy, one would be almost sure that his companion 
was a bad boy whose badness had gotten him into 
trouble. 

For when a bad boy got into trouble he always 
went to ‘‘Old Mang.’’ That great soul had a horror 


64 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


of all sin, and he did not sympathise with boys in. 
their sins; but he did sympathise with them be- 
cause of ther sins. And he felt for them so 
truly that they were drawn irresistibly to him. 
Ashamed as they were to tell so pure a man of 
their wicked deeds, they preferred to tell him 
above all other men, for they knew his heart; they 
knew that while he hated their sins he loved the 
poor sinners. They knew that he was the sinner’s 
friend; that they could go to him assured that 
they would get more sympathy from him and that 
he would do more for them than anyone else they 
knew. And he never failed them. Some of the 
best and most useful men in America to-day owe 
all that they are, under God, to the sympathy of 
‘‘Old Mang,’’ the boys’ friend, who at a certain 
moment in their lives when they were turning into 
the downward path, put his arm around them and 
turned them around and got the difficulties out of 
their way and gave them a new start upward 
again. 

‘‘Old Mang’’ was the sinner’s friend for the 
community in which he lived. I get a like impres- 
sion of Jesus. Jesus is the sinner’s friend for 
the whole world. He is not their comrade or 
chum, but their friend. ‘‘Old Mang’’ was never 
seen in the company of bad boys when they were 
doing wrong. When he was among them they 
were doing their level best. But he was a friend 
in need. He was the friend to whom they could 
go when they were compelled to have a friend. 


“BEHOLD THE MAN! 65 


And so itis with Jesus. He has no sympathy with 
men in their sins. He does not look lightly upon 
men’s sins. But His heart is full of yearning to- 
ward men because of their sins. He has a peculiar 
tenderness for the fellow who has gone wrong 
and who is in need of a friend. He has a pe- 
culiar sympathy—the deepest sympathy of all— 
for the ostracised sinner—the man or woman 
upon whom the world has turned its back. 


VI 


These glimpses of Jesus cover only a very small 
part of his life, but they are sufficient for our 
present purpose. Now let us pause a moment 
and ask, ‘‘What do I think of Him?’’ ‘‘How do 
I feel about Him?’’ 

Let us not be afraid to consult our feelings or 
impressions. Of course our feelings have no part 
in any effort to get at material facts. We don’t 
consult our impressions when we are facing a 
problem in geometry or trying to get at the species 
of a strange bug, but we do consult them—we must 
consult them—when we are trying to get at the 
soul or spirit of a thing, whether it is a poem, a 
painting, an oratorio, a man, or the Great Spirit 
Himself. The student who holds himself rigidly 
to a scientific study of the Gospels, refusing to 
take account of anything beyond what he sees with 
his intellectual vision, shuts himself off from all 
possibility of getting at the spirit of Jesus—at the 


66 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


divine Christ in Jesus—just as effectually as the 
student who holds himself rigidly to a scientific 
study of a poem, or painting, or oratorio, or a 
Washington, a Lincoln or a Lee, shuts himself off 
from all possibility of getting at the spirit of a 
poem, or painting, or oratorio, or a Washington, 
a Lincoln or a Lee. 

When I began to consult my impressions of 
Jesus I noticed a very striking difference between 
the impressions I got in reading the Gospels and 
those which come to me in reading the biography 
of a great man. In reading a biography I would 
pause now and then and say to myself, ‘‘ Here is 
true greatness.’’ But now and then I would come 
upon something that would give my enthusiasm a 
rude shock and I would say, ‘‘What a pity that 
so great a character should be disfigured by such 
a weakness!’’ But in reading the Gospels I do 
not get either of these impressions. I do not think 
that anyone who takes the story of Jesus to a 
quiet spot just to get at His mind and spirit, ever 
gets an impression of mere human greatness, and 
certainly he does not get an impression of human 
weakness. Always my own impressions, instead 
of swinging back and forth between greatness and 
weakness as they do in reading a biography, swing 
back and forth between humanness and divineness. 
I wonder if this has not been your experience! I 
wonder if as we have been reviewing His life you 
have not found yourself saying, ‘‘How human! 
How wonderfully human!’’ And I wonder if, 


BEHOLD THE MAN! 67 


while the thought of his humanness was still in 
your mind—lI wonder if something has not brought 
you up now and then with a jerk and made you 
exclaim, ‘‘That is not human; that is divine!’’ 

No matter how far you go in the life of Jesus, 
if you read it in the way I have suggested, you 
are likely to get these two impressions. And 
nearly always you will get them very close to- 
gether. Yonder He is lying in the bottom of a 
boat so heavy with sleep that a terrific storm does 
not disturb Him. ‘‘How human!’’ you exclaim. 
Another moment and He is standing upright in 
the little rocking craft speaking to the raging 
storm just as man speaks to a little dog that is 
jumping up at him in play. (Someone I believe 
has translated it in these terms. Not ‘‘Peace be 
still,’? but ‘‘Down! Be quiet.’’) And when you 
hear that voice you exclaim, ‘‘That is not human; 
that is divine!’’ In nearly all the stories we have 
of Jesus we get, first a glimpse of the human and 
next a glimpse of the divine. Look for them, 
especially in the last scenes: the Last Supper; 
Gethsemane; Calvary, and the last Resurrection 
story as we have it in the Gospel by John. Every- 
where in the Gospels Jesus is telling us that He is 
human. Everywhere He is telling us that He is 
divine. 


IV 


AN UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 
OF JESUS 


I 


HE picture of a Jesus who was ‘‘without 
form or comeliness’’ apparently had its 
origin in the earnest desire of the Karly 
Christian Fathers to convince their Jewish 
hearers that the Jesus whom they preached con- 
formed in every particular to the Messiah of the 
prophets. It was a blunder born of the best in- 
tentions, and it does not seem to have done any 
serious harm except that in all ages it has been 
a source of pain and perplexity to devoted fol- 
lowers of Jesus, who could no more understand 
how the Supreme Lover of men could be ugly than 
a little child could understand how a loving 
mother could be ugly. 

But in recent years we have been offered, with 
equally good intentions, a conception of Jesus 
which is a far more serious blunder, and I do 
not feel that I should pass from the subject of 
His personal appearance without speaking a very 
frank word concerning it. I refer to the picture 
which has come to be known as the ‘‘ Athletic 


Christ,’’ a conception which had its origin in the 
68 


UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 69 


commendable desire to offset (especially for the 
benefit of young men) the evil effects of the so- 
called effeminate pictures of Jesus which have 
been handed down to us from the past, by pre- 
senting a view of Him which would emphasise the 
heroic aspects of His character. 

This view represents Jesus as a big, brawny- 
armed, happy-hearted, carefree athlete, who went 
forth to His daily task swinging his arms hilar- 
iously, and so full of the sheer joy of living that 
the woods and fields rang with His shouts and 
laughter. 

The best that can be said for this effort to make 
Jesus attractive to young men is that it attracts. 
It has attracted young men to Jesus as a hero, but 
I have yet to learn that they found anything but a 
hero when they came. In other words, it helps 
young men to believe in Jesus, but only in a hu- 
man Jesus. There is nothing in an athletic Christ 
to make a young man fall on his knees before 
Him. College boys may ride a football hero on 
their shoulders, and in a frenzy of admiration may 
imitate him down to the matter of wearing his 
brand of neckties, but they will not bend the knee 
to him. Moreover, when they have grown a little 
older they will smile at the youthful enthusiasm 
which led them to exalt physical muscle above 
mind and spirit, and athletic achievement above 
the things that are eternally worth while. 

I have no great admiration for the imaginative 
portraits of Jesus which have come down to us, 


70 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


but I hardly think that the fight which is now 
being made against them is justified by the facts. 
It has been assumed that our fathers thought of 
Jesus as effeminate, else they would not have 
painted Him as ‘‘a woman with a beard.’’ As a 
matter of fact they did not paint Him as “‘a 
woman with a beard.’’ For the last twenty-five or 
thirty years we have been doing our thinking 
about man, not in the terms of Jesus, but in the 
terms which were common among the ancient 
Greeks, when those remarkable people were exalt- 
ing physical perfection as the glory, if not the 
chief end of man. We have put the physical so far 
above the intellectual and spiritual that we no 
longer see the incongruity of handing an athlete 
a hundred thousand dollars for a week’s engage- 
ment and then turning and offering a college pro- 
fessor or a minister less than one-twentieth of that 
amount for all he can do ina year. It is true that 
we have magnified the physical in the name of 
health, but we are compelled to admit that the 
human body which has come to be the world’s 
ideal is not a healthy body, but an athletic body. 

The medieval masters who painted the imagina- 
tive pictures of Jesus we have to-day, did not have 
this ideal. They were not impressed with the 
glory of brawny arms or muscular jaws, and when 
they came to paint His face they were thinking of 
Him, not as an example of physical perfection, 
but as an example of spiritual perfection. It was 
only natural that in their efforts to put in His face 


UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 71 


the spiritual light and all the charming things of 
the spirit which they thought should be there, 
they should be indifferent to those elements which 
enter into what this athletic-loving generation has 
come to think of as a strong face. And it is quite 
as natural that when one who is obsessed with the 
athletic ideal looks upon these pictures and sees 
no indication of high physical development, he 
should at once put them down as effeminate. Un- 
questionably the face, as we have it, is far from 
strong, but if the present generation had as great 
an appreciation of the spiritual as it has of the 
physical, I am, not sure we would think of it as 
effeminate. Rather, I am inclined to think that 
we would ask whether the old masters did not 
come nearer the truth than we have? It is plain 
that the gentler traits in Jesus were developed to 
a remarkable degree; but one cannot but notice 
that they are all traits of strong characters. He 
had, for example, a motherly tenderness—a trait 
that is found among truly great souls, but never 
among weaklings. A weak man may be ‘‘sissy’’; 
he is never motherly. And we know that nothing 
is easier than for one who is obsessed with the 
athletic ideal to mistake motherliness for ‘‘sissi- 
ness.’’ Possibly that is what we have done in 
the present instance. 

I think we can safely say that most of the im- 
aginative pictures of Jesus which have come down 
to us are not representations of an effeminate 
Jesus, but are simply the more or less successful 


(2 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


results of efforts to show a face in which the life 
of the spirit has done the moulding rather than 
the life of the flesh. | 

But admitting that these pictures are far from 
ideal—and they are—it does not follow that our 
modern pictures of an athletic Christ come any 
nearer the truth. On the contrary, while the old 
pictures fall short of it, the new clearly contradict 
it. To conceive of Jesus as a man of the athletic 
type and spirit we must not only ignore a large 
part of the story of His life, but we must question 
at least one of the best established facts of human 
experience. We can easily imagine a great man 
starting in life with an athletic body and a fond- 
ness for athletic sports, but we cannot conceive of 
him as having the spirit which we usually associ- 
ate with the athlete. Nor can we imagine that he 
will continue athletic in body many months if he is 
aman of boundless sympathies and chooses a life 
in which he must necessarily share every hour in 
the day the sufferings and sorrows of his fellow- 
men. 

It is not difficult to imagine that Jesus entered 
upon His career with a strong, perfectly healthy 
body, but if one will read the Gospels, not to prove 
a theory but simply to saturate himself with 
His mind and spirit, one will find it a pretty 
severe strain upon his imagination to fall in with 
the idea that He came to His work with the 
hilarious, joy-riding spirit which we have come to 
associate with our most popular heroes. And 


UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 73 


granting that He came to His work with the 
strength of an athlete, it is impossible, in the light 
of what we know of His life, to believe that it re- 
mained with Him for any considerable length of 
time. I happen to know a Christlike man—an in- 
effably beautiful spirit of great power—who is as 
big and strong as an athlete, and is a lover of 
athletic sports, though he devotes little time to 
them. This man is sometimes pointed out as an 
argument for an athletic Christ, but he has noth- 
ing whatever in common with the hilarious, care- 
free, joy-riding spirit which our champions of an 
athletic Christ associate with Jesus. To those 
who know his boundless sympathies, nothing is 
plainer than that if he were to be called to a work 
in which he would live in sight of suffering and 
sorrow all the day long, the ceaseless drain upon 
his sympathies as he went about sharing the pains 
and griefs of his fellow-men would soon wear 
down his system and his muscular strength until 
the sheer joy of physical living would disappear, 
and he would have neither the strength nor the 
desire for athletic sports of any kind. 

The compassion of Jesus reached a depth quite 
beyond anything the world had ever known. It 
poured out of His heart in a ceaseless stream, and 
He never attempted to hold it back. Not once in 
the story of His career do we find him steeling 
Himself against the sight of suffering, as the phy- 
siclan is compelled to do to save his strength for 
his work. Every day, and almost every hour of 


74 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


the day, He was surrounded by a people whose 
wretchedness and misery can hardly be conceived 
by the modern Western mind. Hiverywhere we see 
Him sharing the pains and griefs of men who 
had known little but pain and grief. Hverywhere 
He is putting His shoulder beneath the burden of 
sin that is crushing the very life-blood out of the 
hearts of men. Turn the leaves of His story 
slowly and look closely: Where will you find in 
it—anywhere—a breathing chance for an athletic 
Christ? 

If any of you who have experienced the horrors 
of complete nervous prostration will read with an 
open mind the story of the sufferings of Jesus in 
Gethsemane, and then recall the horrible sensa- 
tions which overwhelmed you at the beginning of 
your illness, I think you will close the book with 
the conviction that you have been looking upon a 
Man who had shared the suffering and sorrows 
and sin-burdens of his fellow-men until He had 
spent the last ounce of His strength, and was tot- 
tering on the verge of a complete nervous collapse. 
In three short years He had spent himself unto 
death for men, and it is easy to believe as we read 
of His anguish, that without help from above His 
spirit could hardly have pulled His exhausted body 
the rest of the way. 


II 


These frenzied efforts to make Jesus over to fit 
the needs or fancied needs of a particular period, 


UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 75 


or sex, or situation, are not helping Christians on 
to a clearer or more satisfying conception of the 
real Christ, neither are they encouraging the out- 
side world to take Him seriously. Moreover, the 
demand for such a Christ is a selfish ery, and 
heaven has yet to answer that kind of a cry. It 
would be indeed a strange God who would send 
into the world a Christ peculiarly suited to the 
needs of young men, so long as there were middle- 
aged men and old men and young women and 
middle-aged women and old women and little chil- 
dren who are just as much in need of Christ as 
they are. Moreover, the whole idea is utterly 
repugnant to every serious-minded young man 
who has thought it over. Youth does not want to 
be subsidised for Christian service. It does not 
ask for special privileges in anything. Besides, 
one who is just starting in life is already begin- 
ning to see that the life that is looming up before 
him grows in seriousness and difficulty, and if he 
is interested in Christ at all, he is interested in a 
Christ who will continue to meet his needs further 
on when he gets into the thickest of the fight. 
And if he has listened, as a thoughtful young man 
will, to men who have got a little further along on 
the road, he will realise that his tastes and needs 
and many of his ideals will change in a few years, 
and that what appeals to him with peculiar force 
to-day, may utterly fail to interest him five years 
to come. 

A burnt child should dread the fire. We have 


76 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


just made an experiment in revising religion to 
suit a particular need, and we know how that 
works. A few years ago a great cry went up for 
a work-day religion. We had decided that what 
we humans needed was a religion that would help 
a man behind the counter and in the shop, and 
many of us revised our religion accordingly; we 
cut out everything except service. It never oc- 
curred to us that the most trying moments of life 
—the moments which require the largest rein- 
forcements of moral and spiritual strength—when 
our whole being is crying out for unlimited sup- 
plies of vital force, courage, love, faith, patience— 
are not the moments in which we are absorbed in 
the day’s task, whether the task be for ourselves 
or for others, but the moments when we are not 
doing anything at all; that the average man is far 
better equipped to work at his job than he is to 
play the man when he is thinking over what he has 
done or what he wants to do, or when he is on his 
way home thinking of nothing in particular, but 
with his eyes and ears open to every evil sug- 
gestion along the way, or when he is sitting at the 
dinner table confronted by a nerve-worn wife, a 
erying child, a burnt lamb-chop, and a plumber’s 
bill at the side of his plate. 

But we have learned our lesson. Nowhere in 
America to-day do I find a vestige of the frenzy 
_for a work-day religion that was sweeping over 
the country ten years ago. People have not re- 
turned to the old-time emphasis upon a religion to 


UNINTENTIONAL CARICATURE 77 


die by, but they have turned with utter weariness 
from a religion that simply points out their job 
and tells them to go to work. They want a religion 
that will help them to live as well as work; to 
love as well as serve; to be something as well as 
do something; to play the man in the exigencies 
of life; to stand back and lose rather than go for- 
ward over the bodies of their fellow-men to win; 
to live with God as their Father and with their 
fellow-men as their brothers, not only in active 
service, but in love and trust; and having lived 
as well as served, to die as nobly as they have 
lived. 

The Jesus of the Gospels and of human experi- 
ence is not a fractional Christ designed to meet 
the needs of a fraction of humanity, any more 
than His religion is a fractional religion, designed 
to meet the needs of a fraction of our daily life. 
If this be true, we shall never get anywhere in 
our quest of Jesus so long as we search the Gos- 
pels with an eye to special privilege. We can no 
more understand the real Jesus while we are de- 
manding a Christ especially suited to the peculiar 
needs of our age, our sex, or our time of life, 
than we can understand Him while demanding a 
Christ designed to be the exclusive property of a 
one hundred per cent. American. 


V, 
WHAT WE SEE IN HIM THAT DRAWS US 


I 


E like to assure ourselves that our faith 

\ \) in Jesus is the result of a careful study 

of the facts. It is pleasant to think that 
we believe because we have faithfully sifted out 
and weighed the facts of His life and have found 
that they are all in His favour. But as a matter 
of fact, we-came to believe in Him in the way that 
we came to believe in the best men and women we 
have known. No matter how faithfully we study 
the facts about a man, we never really believe in 
him—never come to the point where we are ready 
to risk our all upon him—until we have come to 
know the real man himself. And we never know 
a man until we know his spirit—until something 
happens that brings our spirits face to face with 
his spirit. 

There is Jones, your business neighbour down- 
town. You have been saying that you have known 
Jones for twenty years. You have been with him 
so often that you are as familiar with the material 
facts about him as you are with the facts about 
your own business. You could even make a close 


guess at the number of freckles on his face. Last 
78 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 79 


week you went with him on a fishing trip down the 
river. You had never been with him alone before. 
One quiet morning, as you sat together in the 
little boat, the fish refused to bite, and you began 
to talk. You said something about business, but 
somehow it seemed out of place, and you fell back 
into silence. Then Jones said something about 
politics, with the same result. At last, under the 
spell of the stillness, you began to talk of the 
things that a man thinks of only when his mind 
has emptied itself of the sordid, blinding material- 
ities of life, and, before you were aware of it, you 
were uncovering your very soul to Jones. And 
soon Jones was uncovering his very soul to you. 
And suddenly you found yourself face to face with 
the real Jones. Until that moment you only knew 
the facts about Jones; now at last you knew Jones. 
Yesterday you came home, and last night you said 
to your wife: ‘‘I made a discovery down the river 
last week.’’ 

‘“What was it?’’ she asked. 

‘‘T discovered Jones.’’ 

‘Why, I thought you had known him for twenty 
years.’’ 

‘‘T thought so, too,’’ you replied, ‘‘but I was 
mistaken. I know him now.”’ 

This is the secret of the method we have been 
trying. Unquestionably ‘‘Old Mang’’ was right. 
No matter how faithfully we may study the facts 
about a man, we never get at the truth about him 
—we never know the real man himself—until we 


80 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


know his spirit; and we never know his spirit 
until we come to a quiet place with him where our 
spirits can catch a vision of his spirit. And no 
matter how carefully we may analyse the Gospels 
to get at the material facts about Jesus, we do not 
find the divine Christ until we go beyond the ma- 
terial facts about Jesus and try to catch a vision 
of Jesus Himself.” And if I may judge from my 
own experience, the surest way to do this is to 
suspend our analytical studies now and then and 
seek a quiet spot where we can rid our minds and 
hearts of all material interests and then drink in 
or meditate upon the story of Jesus as a whole, 
solely for the purpose of getting at and saturating 
ourselves with His mind and spirit. 


It 


Now let us continue this method and see if we 
eannot get a little closer to Him. Whenever I 
make an effort to get at the spirit of Jesus in this 
way, I find myself strangely drawn towards Him 
as by a magnet. This soon ceases to be strange 
when I look to see what it is that is drawing me 
and discover that every feature of His character 
is magnetic. There was a time when I thought I 
saw in Him several things which were far from 
charming, but this was due to certain misinterpre- 
tations of which I shall speak later. 

Always I am drawn first by His unique love. 
Not His love, but His unique love. I must have 
acquired the idea of the uniqueness of His love at 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 81 


avery tender age. Jesus was like my mother and 
my mother’s love was something different from 
other people’s. Everybody loved me when I was 
good, but my mother loved me when I was bad. 
I think it was the consciousness of her love when 
I was bad, rather than the thought of my badness, 
that so often broke my heart. Everybody took 
pleasure in doing thing's for me, but my mother de- 
lighted in doing the things that cost her most. 
She was never happier than when she had a 
‘chance to deny herself for me, or was suffering for 
my sake. I knew that if a famine should over- 
take the world and my mother should have only 
one little, dry crust left, she would thrust that 
little crust into my hand and smile upon me as IL 
ate it every bit. I knew that if I were about to die 
with diphtheria and my mother could take it and 
die in my stead, she would gladly do it. As for 
forgiving me for doing wrong, that was as natural 
and easy to her as smiling. 

And Jesus I was sure was like my mother. 
Years afterwards, when I began to read my Bible 
I found that I was right; Jesus did not love as 
other people loved. We love the lovable; that is 
nothing; Jesus loved the unlovable. We love the 
worthy ; anybody can do that; Jesus loved the un- 
worthy. If you want to see the most marvellous 
thing that ever came into the heart of man, look 
at that strange tenderness in the face of Jesus 
when He is talking to a fallen woman. That feel- 
ing He had for the poor woman of the street makes 


82 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


the average man shudder. It makes the average 
woman stand aghast; she says it is against nature. 
But it is not anti-natural. Now and then we come 
upon it in the heart of a man or a woman who is 
saturated with the spirit of Jesus, and we don’t 
try to account for it on natural grounds. We say 
it is the spirit of Jesus. When I look at Jesus as 
He is talking to a fallen woman, and then turn 
and look at Him upon the Cross, and then turn 
again and look at Him as He is taking back the 
eleven disciples who had forsaken Him, I feel that 
I am looking upon something that is not of this 
world. It is not anti-natural but it is super- 
natural. It is beyond human. ‘‘A new command- 
ment I give unto you, that ye love one another; 
even as I have loved you that ye also love one 
another.’’ I never saw anything new in that com- 
mandment until I realised that the love of Jesus 
was a unique love. 

Think a moment of what this vision of a sacri- 
ficial love which Jesus pointed out to us—pointed 
out in Himself—has done for the world. When 
Jesus came, the world was in a state of collapse. 
It had collapsed so completely that hardly any- 
body was conscious of it. It had practically ceased 
to struggle. A general dry rot had spread over 
the nations. There was peace, but it was the 
peace of listlessness, of utter weariness. Nobody 
had enough ambition or hope or energy to fight. 
The race had drunk its cup to the dregs and found 
nothing worth while. It was dying for want of a 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 83 


new stimulant. No wonder so many in that day 
turned to the deadly hemlock as the easiest way 
out. 

What was the secret of it all? We have it in 
one word—selfishness. It was the cup of selfish- 
ness that the race had drunk to the dregs. Man- 
kind had gone the limit of. self-seeking and self- 
indulgence. JI wish we could realise what this 
means. Selfish as we are, to-day, I doubt if it be 
possible for us to fathom the selfishness of the 
human heart in the ancient world. Jn a day when 
life was worth so little that suicide had ceased to 
attract attention, it was still true that all that a 
man had would he give for his life. The supreme 
duty of man was to look out for self. The idea of 
putting others ahead of one’s self was practically 
unheard of. Even the Hebrews, after ages of re- 
ligious teaching, had got no further than the idea 

“of putting God ahead of self. They believed in 
helping the other fellow under certain limitations, 
but they never dreamed of putting the other fel- 
low first. Of course, there were exceptions to the 
rule, but it is safe to say that when Jesus came, 
a man who would seriously inconvenience himself 
for his fellow-men was exceedingly rare. 

The race had tried out selfishness and had found 
nothing in it. It had found that he that will save 
his life shall lose it; and there it had stopped, 
weary, discouraged, utterly hopeless. Nobody 
dreamed of trying anything else; nobody knew of 
anything else to try. 


84 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


What was it that started the race off again? 
What was it that aroused men and women here 
and there, and caused them to spring to their feet 
with a new light in their eyes and start off with a 
shout and a bound to scale the heavenly heights? 

First of all, it was a vision of Christ’s sacrificial 
love and the call of that love to follow. Next it 
was the programme of sacrificial love which He 
gave to those who turned to follow Him. We have 
forgotten this part of it. We have forgotten that 
when Jesus came and quickened men’s spirits He 
opened their eyes and hearts to a new idea, a new 
programme, a new life. We have forgotten that 
when He spoke to them He held up before them 
the most powerful appeal that He has ever made 
to the best that isin men. We have forgotten that 
He challenged the heroic spirit that was in them. 
‘You have been living for self,’’ He said, ‘‘count- 
ing your life dear unto yourself. That is not like 
the Father; that is not like the Son. That is lke 
the heathen—the heathen who live with the cattle 
that perish. There is a better way. Look!’’? And 
He pointed them to the star of sacrifice—rather 
to the Cross, which meant sacrifice. He who is 
bent upon saving his life like the cattle that perish, 
shall perish with the cattle. He who refuses to 
save his life, who is ready to lose it in a heroic 
passion for God and his fellow-men shall save it 
forever. We have forgotten that this thrilling 
appeal came from the lips of a hero whose every 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 85 


deed inspired men to be heroic, who was contin- 
ually giving His life for the life of men. 

We have forgotten that. And by the way, have 
we also forgotten that so long as the heroic age of 
Christianity lasted, so long as the followers of 
Jesus followed Him in heroic sacrifice, the race 
advanced steadily toward its divine goal, and that 
in two hundred years it made more progress to- 
ward spiritual manhood than it had made in all 
the previous millenniums of its history? Have 
we forgotten that the moment the wonderful love 
of the early Christians for Christ and humanity, 
which Jesus Himself inspired, began to decline 
and they began to look out for themselves like 
other people—have we forgotten that at that very 
moment the race began to go down again, that it 
went down until it lay prone upon the earth, and 
that it was not until the passion for sacrifice came 
again to Christ’s people that men again struggled 
to their feet and the Dark Ages came to an end? 


Tit 


Of course we do not catch the greatest vision 
—the all-powerful vision—of sacrificial love until 
we come to the Cross. To me, c-r-o-s-s 1s just an- 
other way of spelling ‘‘love’’ when love reaches 
the limit. That is, when love reaches the limit in 
the heart, when it goes to the limit in sacrifice, 
when it spreads out to the limit of another’s need. 


86 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


That is what the Crucifixion means to me: it is a 
picture of Supreme Love having its way and doing 
its work to the furthest limit. 

The Cross tells me of a love so great that it com- 
pletely fills the greatest of all hearts. It is a love 
that could not be bigger or stronger or more en- 
during; a love that is unto the uttermost and unto 
the end. I cannot conceive that even Jesus could 
have loved men more than He did when he went 
to His death. 

Of course, when I think of His love as reaching 
the furthest limit in His heart, it is easy for me 
to think of His death as love going to the limit in 
sacrifice for others. But, somehow, we seldom 
think of the vast sweep of the Master’s love now- 
adays, and so we seldom think of His death as a 
sacrifice for others at all. It ought to go without 
saying that all love that reaches the limit in the 
heart goes to the limit in sacrifice. Yet in every- 
day life we talk one moment of the duty of loving 
God and our fellow-men with all our hearts, and 
the next moment proceed to notify our friends 
that we believe in sacrifice, but only within reason- 
able bounds. We will go so far but no further. 
We will do our part but no more. And we never 
see the incongruity of it. The world has always 
managed to soothe its conscience with a fractional 
sacrifice. It is willing to go a certain distance; 
it does not understand why it should go the whole 
way. It is willing to do its part, but it insists 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 87 


upon leaving the rest that others may do their 
part also. The world could never have given us 
the Master’s picture of the Good Samaritan. It 
would have had him bind up the poor fellow’s 
wounds and perhaps carry him to a place of 
safety; and then it would have had him say: 
‘““Now my good fellow, I’ve done my part and if 
others who come this way will do theirs, you will 
be safe at home before night.’’ 

The Cross tells me that it exists to-day be- 
cause of a love that went to the limit for others. 
It reminds me that if the love of Jesus had given 
out one step short of the limit there would have 
been no Cross. If Jesus had said that He was 
willing to do His part, that He was willing to 
make any sacrifice within reason, He would have 
stopped short of death and His sacrifice would 
have been worthless. It was because Jesus took 
the last step to the grave, that we have the Cross 
and all that the Cross means to us. 

But this is not all. The death of Jesus tells me 
of a love that spreads out to the furthest limit 
of my deepest need. There was a time when our 
theological controversies over the Cross gave me 
no end of trouble; but that day has passed. If I 
find myself beginning to worry over one of those 
old questions I have only to reflect that the death 
of Jesus was Supreme Love going to the limit, 
and that if it went to the limit it could not fall 
short of the limit of my deepest need. 


88 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


IV 


Before we turn away from the Cross, let me 
remind you that we are standing at the source of 
this vast stream of passion for humanity which is 
to-day sweeping over the world, and without 
which, nothing short of a miracle could have pulled 
the world through the last dozen years. We have 
been thinking of our passion for humanity as a 
new discovery. We speak of it as something that 
came into being a few years ago, since we began 
to develop a social conscience. We are quite sure 
that our fathers knew nothing of it. But we have 
been misled by appearances. I am unable to see 
anywhere to-day greater evidences of a passion 
for humanity than I saw in my youth. The only 
difference I can see is in its forms of expression. 
Our fathers and mothers certainly had as much 
of this holy fire in them as we have, but they had 
not learned the art of organisation and each did 
his work in his own way, and their individual ef- 
forts were necessarily so limited in their sweep 
that they did not attract any attention. It was 
like the business of those simple days. Every 
man was in business for himself, and ten thousand 
owners of small stores did their work in their lim- 
ited sphere without attracting half as much atten- 
tion as the head of a single big business organisa- 
tion attracts to-day. 

Our passion for humanity is not a modern idea; 
only our organisation for making it more effective 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 89 


is modern. It was not education, it was not even 
love in its usual sense, that started it. It was a 
sacrificial love—the love the world discovered 
when it looked upon the Cross. 

The world caught its first vision of a passion for 
humanity in Christ. Among good men there had 
always been a compassion for the needy, and here 
and there men’s hearts were swept with a passion 
for their nation, and once in a long while, a man 
had appeared with a consuming passion for God; 
but there is nothing to show that the world ever 
heard of a passion for mankind until it was dis- 
covered in the face of Jesus. Buddha had shown 
a great passion for the light which he brought, 
and no doubt he had a great compassion for men 
whom he found stumbling in darkness; but there 
is no indication that he was ever under the com- 
pulsion of that divine, all-inclusive, consuming 
love that makes a man willing to lay down his life 
for people he has never seen. 

Here at last was something new under the sun. 

It was not only something different, but it had 
the power to make everything else different. And 
the moment men discovered it they began to be 
different. Before they looked into the face of 
Christ they stood aloof from humanity and con- 
tented themselves with dropping small coins into 
the hands of the needy; now they began to come 
closer and to take the needy by the hand. They 
came closer, not only because they recognised their 
kinship with one another, but because their 


90 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


hearts were swept by this new and wonderful pas- 
sion. They had no sooner discovered it in the 
heart of Christ than it had seized upon their own 
hearts and swept them together. When people 
are on fire they are bound to come together. And 
those early Christians were ablaze with the great- 
est passion the human heart had ever known. 
Rather it was a double passion; it embraced both 
humanity and the Christ of humanity. With such 
a flame in their hearts they simply could not stay 
apart. They had to come together, not only for 
humanity’s sake but for Christ’s sake. And when 
they came together they had to put their heads as 
well as their hearts together. They had to put 
their heads close together over the wonderful 
programme for helping their fellow-men which 
Christ had given them. What could interest them 
so much as that marvellous plan which provided 
for their co-operation with Him in the work of 
rescuing fellow-humans from the death of sin and 
transforming them into men for his Kingdom? 

When men who are on fire for Christ and hu- 
manity put their heads and hearts together over 
Christ’s programme for humanity we know what 
is going to happen. It is bound to happen. It is 
impossible to conceive of those disciples coming 
together over the programme of Jesus and then 
letting it all end in nothing but a prayer meeting. 
They had to get up and go to work. And they 
had to work according to the programme of sacri- 
ficial love which Jesus had given them. 


WHAT WE SEE IN HIM 91 


Let us not forget that. Let us not forget that 
they carried with them a programme. With all 
their enthusiasm for Christ and humanity they 
~would not have stood together long enough to 
accomplish anything if Christ had not given them 
a definite programme. As it was they knew ex- 
actly what they were expected to do and they knew 
exactly how to go about it. There was nothing 
mysterious about it and there was no confusion. 
They knew what they were to do while waiting for 
the order to start, and when the order: came they 
knew exactly which way to go. And they went. 
They didn’t fumble or flounder. They went. 

And they went with tremendous enthusiasm. 
They had made wonderful discoveries and they 
had all the fire that wonderful discoveries kindle, 
and something more. They had discovered Christ 
and they had discovered humanity and they had 
discovered a new calling—a wonderful calling: 
they had discovered that the supreme business of 
life was to co-operate with Christ in the loving, 
sacrificial task of turning human beings into real 
men for the Kingdom of God. And they sprang to 
their work as men spring up a ladder to rescue 
little children from a burning building. One man 
pressed forward with such passion and power 
that if he could have gone on for a hundred years 
the whole world would have heard his wonderful 
message. 

And the whole story of this wonderful thing is 
a story of sacrificial love, born of a vision of the 
sacrificial love of Jesus. 


VI 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS OF THE MAN 
HIMSHELE 


I 


O doubt the first thing I saw in Jesus 

N that drew me to Him was His unique 
love. I am almost as sure that the next 

thing was His purity; that is, purity as a child 
would understand the term. My mother had a face 
that the world called immaculate. She looked like 
one into whose soul no speck of sin had ever 
found its way. No one could have ever convinced 
her friends that she ever told a fib, that she ever 
' kept back part of the truth, that she ever carried 
the slightest trace of insincerity in her heart. If 
it were a question of lying or dying, they knew 
that she would choose to die. She taught me that 
I must never use a single word that I could not 
utter in her presence, and I seriously doubt 
whether from her childhood up she ever uttered a 
word that she could not utter in her son’s pres- 
ence. She had such a horror of impure speech 
that her children caught it from her, and to this 
day, although I somehow escaped having my 


mouth washed out with soap and water for saying 
92 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 93 


a bad word, there are times when I can almost 
taste the soap! 

Years afterwards, when I came upon Jesus in 
my Bible, I found that the conviction of my early 
years that Jesus was pure like my mother was 
true. When I looked upon Him as He appeared 
to me in the Gospels, I could not imagine the 
tiniest speck of sin having ever touched His soul. 
And I knew if it came to a question of lying or 
dying He would die. 

Later when I began to dip into ancient liter- 
ature I got a wider vision of His immaculateness. 
This suggests a subject that is too disagreeable to 
speak about, but if those of you who are familiar 
with certain unspeakably vile ancient Greek 
stories which students are supposed to read, will 
place one of these stories by the side of the Gospels 
and note the contrast, you will understand what I 
have in mind. 

But the immaculateness of Jesus never meant 
as much to me as it does to-day, or rather as it 
has since the present horrible tidal wave of im- 
purity began to sweep over the world. When, 
heartsick over some new revelation of vileness, I 
turn toward Him and get a vision of His snow- 
whiteness, I find my heart crying out, ‘‘O Blessed 
Spirit, give to this generation a vision of the 
Holy, Holy, Holy One that will cause men to cry 
out as did the prophet in the Temple, ‘Woe is me, 
for I am undone; for I am a man of unclean lips.’ 

‘‘Q Master, this hour will I write purity upon 


94 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


my brow, purity upon my lips, purity upon my 
heart; and I will follow Thee, the pure, immacu- 
late Christ, forever !’’ 


II 


There were other winsome traits—such as gen- 
tleness, patience, fellow-feeling,—which I recog- 
nised in Jesus in my childhood, but these I had 
learned to associate with all good people and 
they made no unusual impression upon me. So 
far as I can now recall, I did not discover any- 
thing else in Him that drew me, either in my child- 
hood or youth, or indeed as a man, until, as I have 
said, I came to see that my method of Bible study, 
which consisted in merely analysing a verse or 
chapter or book, yielded nothing but material 
facts, and that to get at the truth—at the soul of 
a passage, its real message to my soul—I must fol- 
low analysis with synthesis—put the thing I had 
picked to pieces together again and try to grasp 
it or, ‘‘drink it in’? as a whole. When I began to 
do this—when, after analysing the story of Jesus, 
I undertook to go beyond the material facts about 
Jesus to get at His mind and spirit—to get at 
Jesus Himself—I found that my vision of Him, 
which had long remained unchanged, had again 
begun to widen, and I was getting glimpses of 
traits that I had never:seen before. Some of these 
traits were so strange that they startled me be- 
fore they drew me. 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 95 


I am ashamed to say how old I was before it 
occurred to me that Jesus was—well, there is no 
word for it unless we call it ‘‘motherly.’’ I have 
already, in a passing reference to His motherly 
tenderness, reminded you that this is a trait of 
strong characters and is never found among weak- 
_ lings. A weak man may be a ‘‘sissy’’; he is never 
motherly. And Jesus was motherly. A mother’s 
sense of proprietorship, combined with her sense 
of responsibility and her love, develops a provi- 
dential attitude toward her children which even- 
tually extends beyond them to every human being 
in sight who needs mothering. Jesus had that 
attitude. I wish you would turn the leaves of the 
Gospels slowly and notice His motherly way of 
looking at people. Here is an instance I have 
already mentioned in another connection. He is 
looking upon a great crowd of hard-driven, weary, 
burdened, heartsick toilers; men who need mother- 
ing. And just as a mother stretches out her arms 
to a tired, discouraged child, and says, ‘‘Come to 
mother,’’ this Man stretches out His arms toward 
that great tired, discouraged throng and says, 
‘‘Come unto me. Come unto me, all ye that labour 
and are Dae ce and I will give you rest.’’ 

_ Here is another. He is scanning the faces of 
His disciples. They are all tired and nerve-worn. 
They need a day off in a quiet place. And He 
does for them just what a thoughtful mother 
would do. He plans a day off. ‘‘Let us go apart 
and rest awhile.’’ 


96 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


He had a mother’s way of standing up for her 
own when they are criticised. He had a mother’s 
way of anticipating the wants of others. Here 
He is, looking out over a great throng of weary 
people. He has just noticed that the sun is about 
to set. He remembers that they are far from 
home, and He says to Himself, ‘‘It will not do to 
send them away hungry; they must have their 
supper.’’ And He gives them their supper. 

Again we see Him standing on the seashore as 
the day begins to dawn, looking at the dim forms 
of His disciples in the distance. ‘‘Boys,’’ he cries, 
‘have you caught any fish?’’ No, they have had 
a bad night and have caught nothing. The boys 
must have their fish, and He sees to that. And 
then it occurs to Him that they will come ashore 
wet, and cold, and hungry, and miserable, and He 
says to Himself, ‘‘The boys must have their break- 
fast.’’ And when the boys come ashore breakfast 
is ready! 

I have said that this is a trait of strong char- 
acters, never of weaklings. Paul had it. Watch 
him as he comes ashore on the morning of the 
wreck. It is cold, and the natives have been 
thoughtful enough to build a fire on the beach. 
And the poor shivering castaways are all crouch- 
ing around the fire. Paul is as wet and cold and 
wretched as the rest, but as he comes up, a glance 
at the fire tells him that it will not last long, and 
he hurries off down the beach, and presently comes 
back with an armful of bits of wood to replenish 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 97 


it. I don’t think it was in Saul of Tarsus to do 
that; it must have come to him later on, when he 
was becoming saturated with the spirit of Christ. 


Tit 


Always thinking of others! Always anticipat- 
ing the wants of others, never giving a thought to 
self. How like a mother! That was Jesus. 
There is no friend like a mother, except Jesus 
and those who are filled with His spirit. See the 
length to which His friendship will go! There 
was no need to which His heart did not respond. 
And it had to respond with something more than 
tears or words. He could not weep over a poor 
fellow who was in trouble and dry his eyes and 
turn away satisfied with Himself because he had 
shown His sympathy for him. He had to do some- 
thing; He had to lend a hand. | 

Notice his boundless compassion for enslaved 
people. His heart was continually going out to 
men and women who were held down. He was al- 
ways breaking the chains that bound people. How 
earnestly and persistently did He seek to deliver 
people whose minds were enslaved by the tyranny 
of the rabbis. And He was always delivering 
people from the slavery of sin. He could always 
be depended upon to take sides with the oppressed 
against the oppressor. 

Jesus was, and is, the world’s greatest emanci- 
pator. His heart goes out to every man, woman 


98 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


and child who is bound down, whether in soul, 
mind or body. ‘Those heathen religions which 
recognise sin look forward to distant ages when 
a man may gradually free himself from its en- 
tanglements. But Jesus breaks the bonds here 
and now. He breaks all sorts of evil bonds. He 
is ready to free us to-day from every entangle- 
ment of sin. He will not only break the bond 
which keeps our hands tied when they ought to 
serve; He will break the chain that binds a man to 
a deadly vice. And surely He is ready to have 
us break the bonds of ignorance and tyranny that 
are cheating so many millions of people out of 
their chance to rise to spiritual manhood in the 
Kingdom of God! 

What a wonderful record he has as a friend! 
It is pleasant to think that we do not have to wait 
for Him to prove either His friendship or His 
power. He has already done all the things for 
others that I need to have done for me, and it is 
the testimony of all men who have seen His work 
that He has done these things well. 

If He has done them well for others, He can 
do them well for me. If my hearing is still dull— 
if I am slow to hear the voice of God and slow to 
understand His will, I must go to Him; for He 
doeth all things well. If I hesitate in speech—if I 
fail to speak the word of comfort, of inspiration, 
of admonition, of encouragement which I ought 
to speak, I must go to Him; it is His will that I 
should have freedom of utterance, and He doeth 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 99 


allthings well. If I fail to see God’s truth clearly, 
if I fail to discern the path of duty, if I am blind 
to passing opportunities, if my soul is weak for 
want of food, if I have a demon of vice lurking in 
me, if I am still almost dead in sin, I must go to 
Him; for He is my friend and he would not have 
me stumble in the dark, or miss the way, or starve 
along the way. He wants me to have life and to 
have it more abundantly. He wants me to follow 
in His steps. He wants me to be like Him. If I 
will put myself in His hands, He will make me 
like Him. He is a friend indeed, and He will not 
be content until He has moulded me in His own 
image. 


IV 


A well-developed mind seems to automatically 
take care of itself. It has its own ways of pre- 
serving its balance and its clearness of perception. 
For example, if the mind has dwelt upon a gentle 
trait of Jesus, it will naturally turn for contrast 
or change to a stronger trait. If you force your 
mind from one gentle trait to another, and an- 
other, and continue on that side too long, it will 
lose its normal balance and it will give you dis- 
torted pictures of Jesus. 

J have intimated that it was at a comparatively 
late period of life that I got my first glimpse of 
what I have called the motherliness of Jesus. It 
was at quite as late a period that I caught my first 
glimpse of His heroism. I am ashamed to confess 


100 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


it, though I am aware that it is not an unusual 
experience. I have been amazed in recent years 
at the number of persons one meets who frankly 
confess that they have never thought of Jesus as 
a hero. One comes upon strong, middle-aged men 
—good men—who think of Him very much as they 
think of an aged mother. If a man’s mother lived 
to a great age the picture which he carries in his 
memory is not of his mother in the midst of life, 
but of mother as she appeared when she had re- 
tired from active life. A dear old saint of four- 
score or more, her sweet, thin face enveloped in 
an ineffable calm, sitting in her easy chair, her 
open Bible in her lap, her long, thin, blue-veined 
hands resting upon it—that is the picture. There 
she sits all the day long, now reading a bit, now 
knitting a bit, now nodding a bit, now thinking of 
kind things to say about mean people—bless her 
heart !—never raising her voice in protest against 
anything in the world except little Johnny’s cruel 
custom of sticking pins in flies. That is Mother. 

Do not think I am making light of mothers. 
If there is a human being [ come near worshipping 
itis anoble mother. But aman thinks of his own 
mother as the best Christian he knows, and as she 
must be like Christ, Christ must be like her. And 
this man whose mother lived to a great age for- 
gets that the picture that he has in mind is the 
picture not of Mother as she was in the midst of 
life when she was fighting her battles, but of his 
mother retired from active life, her battles over, 





OTHER IMPRESSIONS 101 


her strength all gone. Mother in the midst of 
life was no non-resister; she was a fighter, and the 
bravest of the brave. I do not wonder that the 
man who turns from his mother as she was in her 
heroic days to worship at the shrine of his aged 
mother, whose battles are over, whose strength is 
all gone—I do not wonder that he has a hard time 
trying to conceive of Jesus as a hero. 

Others have quite as hard a time because of 
their reverence for certain aged methods of Bible 
study, which, unlike our dear old mothers, have 
never deserved our reverence. I remember how, 
in my boyhood, when I religiously took every 
word of Jesus literally without regard to what 
He was talking about—I remember how sorry I 
was that Jesus said that He was meek and lowly 
in heart. I thought of meekness as weakness, and 
I despised meek people. Uriah Heep was meek. 
That old whining hypocrite across the street was 
meek. That poor trembling soul in the alley who 
was ready to lie down in the road and let the 
whole world run over her was meek. I could not 
believe that Jesus was one of those weak things, 
but the Bible said He was meek, and there I was! 
I had always found him to be like my mother, 
and my mother was not one of those meek things. 
My mother was a fighter, the greatest fighter I 
ever knew. She would fight dirt, she would fight 
the devil, she would fight all the evil forces that 
were trying to get into her home after her chil- 
dren, she would fight for her children, and some- 


102 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


T had always found Him to be like my mother, 
a switch! And yet she loved to tell me that Jesus 
was meek! 


V 


I was a full-grown man before it dawned upon 
me that when Jesus said, ‘‘ Blessed are the meek,”’’ 
He was speaking, not of the weak, but of the 
strong. He had in mind what we call nowadays 
the spirit of the true gentleman. Blessed is the 
man of gentlemanly spirit—the man who has such 
a regard for his fellow-men, that when he sees a 
chance of winning the earth and others are rush- 
ing in to get there first, rather than run rough- 
shod over them to get ahead of them, will stand 
back like a true gentleman and lose his chance. 

But someone will ask, ‘‘Does not the prophet 
say, ‘He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, 
and as a sheep before his shearers is dumb, so he 
openeth not his mouth’?’’ Certainly, but that is 
not a picture of the Messiah’s life; that is a pic- 
ture of the Messiah offering Himself in sacrifice. 
Jesus came to drink the cup of suffering to the 
dregs and then to drink the dregs, and when the 
time came for His supreme sacrifice, His enemies 
could do their worst; He would not open His 
mouth. But in His daily life did He keep His 
mouth shut? Ask those hypocrites, the Pharisees, 
who winced and cringed under His terrific de- 
-nunciations as a pack of hounds would shrink from 
‘their master’s whip. 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 103 


I thank God that the Master whom I serve was 
a man; that though He had all the sweetness and 
tenderness and gentleness of a little child, yet He 
was a man—a man with iron in His blood; the 
kind of a man to whom a woman instinctively 
looks for protection, and in whose arms little chil- 
dren rest as they who dwell in the secret place of 
the Most High and abide under the shadow of the 
Almighty. 

Thank God for a Saviour who never ceased to 
be a God, and who never failed to be a man! 

A man—the most courageous, the most fearless, 
the most heroic man this world has ever known; 
the one man who could always be depended upon 
to do the thing that needed to be done, to speak 
the word that ought to be spoken, to overcome the 
thing that ought to be overcome, to endure the 
thing that ought to be endured. 

But did not Jesus tell us to turn the other 
cheek? No. Did He ever turn the other cheek? 
Did He not tell us that we should not resist evil? 
No. He was the greatest resister of evil the 
world ever saw. Did He not use those very words? 
Yes; but if a man should tell you of a very ugly 
thing a friend of yours said about you, what would 
you say? If you were a true friend you would 
say: ‘‘That doesn’t sound like him. He may 
have used those very words, but I want to know 
what he was talking about.’’ And you would 
demand to know what he was talking about. 

Suppose we should play the part of true friends 


104 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


to Jesus and ask what He was talking about. 
What would we learn? If you will turn to the 
words in the Sermon on the Mount and read the 
context, you will find that Jesus was talking about 
the horrible habit of retaliation—striking back in 
revenge, demanding an eye for an eye and a tooth 
for a tooth—a habit which was eating the very 
soul out of the Jewish people. What Jesus was 
saying was that it was better to endure anything 
rather than strike back in revenge. If a man 
wrongs you, it is better to let him wrong you again 
than strike back in revenge. If he strikes you on 
one cheek, better let him smite you on the other 
than strike back in revenge. It would be better 
never to resist evil at all, than yield to the hor- 
rible spirit of revenge. 

When we turn aside from these misinterpreta- 
tions and read the Gospels solely to get at the 
mind and spirit of Jesus, almost everywhere we 
come upon Him we see Him in the attitude of a 
hero. He has the heroic attitude toward life. 
Human as He is, He is utterly unmoved by the 
worldly considerations which warp the thinking 
and dwarf and distort the moral natures of men. 
He is as indifferent as Almighty God (I say it 
reverently) to money, to position, to the appeal 
to ‘‘safety first,’? to considerations of personal 
comfort. It is utterly impossible for us to con- 
ceive of Him as standing on deck and shouting to 
other people to rescue the man who has fallen 
overboard. He came to the whole race and it was 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 105 


nothing to Him to take his place down among the 
lowly where the great masses of the race were to 
be found. We can hardly conceive of Him as 
choosing to live on any other level. If He should | 
come in the flesh to New York to-day, we do not | 
know where He would stop; but no man would | 
dare offer Him a suite at a Fifth Avenue hotel. 
Nor would any man dare offer Him a luxurious © 
motor car. Hverywhere He stands upon a plane 
that is utterly beyond the reach of the things that 
appeal to human weakness. HEiverywhere He is a 
hero. 

He begins His career with an act of heroism 
that is of such an exalted character that it almost 
staggers our imagination. We come upon Him 
sitting upon a rock in a desolate place, almost 
starved to death. When aman is at that point He 
is at his weakest point in life, not only physically 
but morally. He is at the point where most men 
are no longer governed by any sense of responsi- 
bility or obligation to God or man. At that point 
aman will kill his fellow-man and eat him. And 
this lone Man in the wilderness has reached His 
weakest point. It is easy to imagine that as the 
forces of evil steal upon Him they are smiling 
at the thought that they will find Him easy prey. 
They have brought with them all the allurements 
of the world that could appeal to a good man, and 
if He does not yield to one He will to another. 
But the Man gazes upon them all as they pass in 
a panorama before His mental vision, without so 


106 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


much as batting an eye; and when it is all over 
He calmly rises to His feet and takes the steep, 
rugged path that leads to the Cross the Father 
has pointed out to Him. 

From this point there is heroism all the way to 
the end. And at the end— 

A big, brawny-armed brute of a Roman soldier 
drops upon his knees beside the prostrate form, 
picks up his hammer and with a fiendish laugh 
sends the nails smashing, crashing through the 
quivering flesh. 

And with every muscle and every nerve quiver- 
ing so that he can hardly form the words upon his 
lips, the Man groans: 

‘‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what 
they do.’’ 


VI 


I have pointed out only those traits in the char- 
acter of Jesus which I have found peculiarly win- 
some, but I need not go further. Let me adda 
word in regard to His character as a whole. 

One of the wonderful things in Jesus which are 
often overlooked is the power of His character 
to make us see ourselves. Take your Bible to a 
quiet place and sit down and be still. Then open 
it at one of the Gospels and turn the leaves very 
slowly, and when you come upon a story which 
brings out a trait of His character very clearly, 
pause and brood over it. In a few moments you 
will feel as if you were sitting before a mirror 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 107 


looking at your own soul in the midst of a flood 
of light from above. For example, you are brood- 
ing over a story, and presently you catch a 
glimpse of His wonderful love. Instantly you 
become conscious of little traces of hate or bitter- 
ness or narrowness in your own soul, which you 
never dreamed were there. 

Many good people often wonder what use they 
can make of Jesus in their everyday life. Here is 
one: we can use His character to keep tab on our 
inner selves—our souls—just as we use a mirror 
to keep tab on our outer selves—our bodies. Im- 
agine that you have followed my suggestion; that 
you have just caught a glimpse of His love that 
has revealed little traces of hate or bitterness or 
narrowness in your own soul, just as a careful 
look at your face in your mirror would reveal a 
trace of soot on your cheek that you did not dream 
was there. 

Now go on turning the leaves slowly. Hereis a 
story that gives you a glimpse of His purity—His 
perfect snow-whiteness of soul. Pause over it and 
in a moment you discover little traces of impurity 
in your heart which you could never have be- 
lieved were there. Goon. Here is a story that 
brings out in a startling way His perfect sincerity. 
Yesterday, if any man had questioned your sin- 
cerity you would have felt like slapping him in 
the face. You may have questioned your love or 
the purity of your heart, but you have never 
doubted that you were sincere. But now as you 


108 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


look upon the perfect sincerity of Jesus a sense 
of shame steals over you: you have just caught a 
elimpse of little traces of insincerity in your 
heart, your speech, your gestures which you never 
saw before. 

How these quiet-hour glimpses of Jesus stir up 
my soul even while they fill me with shame! 
Here I am, a living monument of selfishness. 
There He goes, spending Himself unto death for 
others. Here I am, tempted to curse the man who 
curses me. I turn the leaves of this Book and 
presently, I see those eyes gazing calmly into 
mine and I hear Him saying, ‘‘Bless them that 
eurse you.’’ Here I am, itching to strike the 
man who despitefully uses me. Without turning 
a leaf I look again at His words and again I see 
those eyes calmly fixed upon me, and I hear Him 
saying, ‘‘Pray for them that despitefully use 
you.’’ Here I am in an ugly mood, saying to my- 
self: ‘‘I hke to do kind things for grateful 
people, people who appreciate my kindness,’’ and 
I take another look at the same page, and again I 
meet that calm gaze of his and I hear Him telling 
me that I should be like my Father, who is kind 
to the unthankful and evil. 

The character of Jesus acts both as a flawless 
mirror and a perfect light to make us see our 
hearts just as they are, and thus enables us to 
keep tab on our inner selves. 

A generation ago, when the old custom of fre- 
quent self-examination was still in vogue, some 


OTHER IMPRESSIONS 109 


people indulged in self-introspection so much that 
it made them morbid. Since then, we have been 
so busy trying to get other people to look into 
their mirrors that we have fallen out of the habit 
of looking into our own. And now we are comfort- 
ing ourselves with the thought that we are at any 
rate avoiding the danger of becoming morbid. To 
a beautiful girl who recently wrote me of her per- 
plexity on this point, I replied: ‘‘My dear, you 
are a beautiful thing, but I should hate for you 
to stop using your mirror. Just as it is necessary 
to go to a glass mirror often enough to keep tab 
on the condition of your face, so it is necessary to 
use the character of Jesus as a mirror often 
enough to keep tab on the condition of your soul.”’ 

A man neglects his mirror and the little specks 
of dirt accumulate until his face is dirty and he 
doesn’t know it. We call hima hobo. Many mod- 
ern Christians have neglected to use the character 
of Jesus as a mirror, and the little specks of sin 
have accumulated until their souls are dirty. And 
they don’t know it. 

A hobo Christian is not a pleasant sight. 


Ca, 


VII 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF UNDER- 
STANDING HIS TEACHINGS 


I 


\ , YHEN I have succeeded in getting a dis- 
tinct impression of the character of 
Jesus by the method which I have sug- 
gested and which I have been trying to use in these 
pages—that is, when I have not been satisfied to 
stop with analysing the story, but have gone on and 
tried to grasp it as a whole with my intellectual 
vision, and then have brooded over it until I have 
got a view of His character as a whole with my 
spiritual vision, I have found that I have another 
reason for believing in Jesus. I believe in Him 
because of what I have learned of His character, 
a character which though human, so far tran- 
scends the human that it is utterly impossible to 
account for it on human or natural grounds. 
Drop for a moment the kind of thinking you do 
when you want to get at material facts, and rid 
your mind as far as possible of all material 
interests and considerations, and open your heart 
as well as your mind towards Him in an effort to 
grasp His character, and you will get an impres- 


sion that will never allow you to be satisfied with 
110 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 111 


the theory that the character of Jesus was a 
purely human character developed to an unusual 
degree. You have a moral conviction that you are 
in the presence, not merely of a highly developed 
man, but of one who is different from all other 
men. 

When I have gone over the words of Jesus by 
the same method, I find that I have still another 
reason for believing in Him. Rather I should 
have said, when I go over His words to-day. 
While the teachings of Jesus have always seemed 
to me to be unusual, I did not see in them any- 
thing that impressed me as being very far beyond 
the teachings of other great religious leaders until 
I had passed through the tragical experience to 
which I have referred—the experience which led 
me to a place in life where I could see life from 
His own point of view, and where I got rid of 
some other obstacles which all through my early 
life had effectually shut out the meaning of many 
of His teachings. This suggests that before tak- 
ing up the words of Jesus it would be well to 
think a little while of some of the serious ob- 
stacles which we have to contend with to-day in 
our efforts to understand Him. 

Why is it that the simplest of all the great 
teachers who have come to the human race, is still, 
after nearly two thousand years of Christian 
teaching, the most widely misunderstood teacher 
the world has ever known? 


112 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


II 


Some of the obstacles in the way of understand- 
ing Jesus are intellectual; others are spiritual. 
Perhaps the commonest of the intellectual ob- 
stacles are those which through all the ages have 
made the sexes almost a hopeless mystery to each 
other. From the beginning of time, men have in- 
sisted upon either taking a woman literally or 
interpreting her from their own point of view. 
And if I could bring myself to indulge in so reck- 
less a venture, I would say that the same is true 
of women. Men have always said that you can- 
not take a woman literally, and yet they have al- 
ways insisted upon taking her literally. Of course 
you cannot take a woman literally. Nor can you 
take a man literally. You cannot take anybody 
literally except a mathematician who is talking in 
terms of mathematics, and even then, you must 
watch him closely lest his figures should drop into 
figures of speech. And yet we insist upon taking 
the words of Jesus literally. Do I mean that we 
must take them figuratively? No; I only mean 
that we must not take them [-2-t-e-r-a-l-l-y—let- 
ter for letter, word for word, just as they appear 
on the surface without regard to what He is talk- 
ing about. A man treats the words of an enemy 
that way; a lawyer treats the words of his op- 
ponent that way; a husband treats the words of 
his wife that way; but I know of no friend whose 
words we treat that way unless we are out of 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 113 


humour with him, except Jesus. We insist upon 
taking the words of Jesus literally, whether we 
are out of humour with Him or not. 

We have quite as much difficulty in understand- 
ing the words of Jesus when we insist upon in- 
terpreting them from our own point of view—just 
as if the words were spoken by a Westerner to a 
modern Western audience instead of by an Orien- 
tal to an ancient Oriental audience. But this 
opens up an endless field, and we shall have to 
pass it by. 

Then there is the intellectual difficulty which 
is common in academic circles; the illusion that 
to get at the truth about anything in any sphere 
we must use the scientific method (in spite of the 
fact that this method was designed only to get at 
material facts), and must approach it in the scien- 
tific attitude of doubt or questioning, which like- 
wise was designed only to get at material facts. I 
have already referred to the confusion which has 
resulted from the impossible experiment of try- 
ing to get at the truths of the spirit by this 
method; as for the scientific attitude, well— 

Here is John just home from college. John is 
complaining that we Christians are so unscien- 
tific. We just assume that religion is true, when 
the only way to get at the truth, as everybody 
knows, is to approach it in an attitude of doubt. L. 
say to him: 

‘¢Son, that is true when we are trying to get at 
a fact about matter. In every material investiga- 


114 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


tion you must approach a thing in an attitude of 
questioning or you will néver get anywhere. But 
to say that we must approach religion, which is a 
thing of the spirit, in the same way, why, that is 
another matter. Suppose you should wish to get 
at the truth about your mother’s hair. That is a 
material thing, and you must approach it in an 
attitude of questioning or doubt. If you should 
say, ‘Oh, Mother is all right, and I know her hair 
is all right,’ you would never get at the truth 
about it, unless one morning Mother should be in 
a hurry and leave the truth on the dresser. But 
suppose you wanted to get at the truth about your 
mother’s love for you. Would you approach the 
matter in that way? Try it, young man. Go to 
your mother to-night, before you go to bed and 
lay your hands upon her shoulders and say: 
‘Mother, I have been thinking about whether you 
really love me or not, and I doubt it; and I want 
to settle it right now.’ Do you think you would 
get anywhere?’’ 

Love shrinks from doubt and shuts itself up like 
an oyster in its shell. 

And so I say to John: ‘“‘If you want to get at 
the facts about any material thing that is associ- 
ated with our religion—such as the materials of 
which the Bible is composed—approach it in an 
attitude of doubt if you will; but you will never 
get at the truth about religion itself that way any 
more than you will get at the truth about your 
mother’s love that way. You have got to open 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 115 


your heart to your mother’s love and bask in the 
warm sunshine of it to get at the truth about it, 
and you have got to open your heart to the life of 
love we call religion, and bask in the warm sun- 
shine of it to get at the truth about that.’’ 


Tit 


Some of our intellectual difficulties grow out of 
spiritual difficulties. There are evil desires in the 
heart which unconsciously lead us to a purely ma- 
terialistic point of view—a point of view from 
which it is utterly impossible to grasp any spir- 
itual truth which Jesus has taught. And there is 
our selfish nature which, the moment it begins to 
master us, leads us to the selfish point of view, 
where we might as well shut our eyes, for we shall 
see nothing that 1s worth while. 

The average man is in the world for what he 
can get out of it. Jesus came for what He could 
put into it. It is not strange that so many people 
do not understand Him. A selfish man simply 
cannot get the point of view of the man who looks 
out for the other feliow. Doing things for people 
without pay excites his suspicion; he is sure there 
is a selfish motive behind it. He looks out for 
‘number one,’’ himself, and he expects other men 
to do the same; and if he finds a man looking out 
for ‘‘number two’’ he is tempted to believe that it 
is only a blind. So when a man undertakes to 


A TESTOR: ys 


116 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


help his fellow-men he has a good deal of hard 
work to do to convince them that he is in earnest. 

Jesus had to spend a good deal of time in con- 
vineing people that He had no interest of His 
own to serve, and that His sole desire was to sup- 
ply their deepest needs. He did not spend a mo- 
ment looking out for Himself. He did not stand 
up for the rights which the world is supposed to 
give to every man who comes into it. He did not 
even insist upon His right to a place to lay His 
head. He did not claim that the world owed Him 
a living. He did not grasp at anything as His 
own. And whenever He did anything for men it 
was done so freely that no man ever thought of 
offering to pay Him for His services. The noble- 
man of Capernaum would not have dared send 
Him the camel-load of precious things that surely 
would have gone to any other man that had healed 
his son. And He was always doing things for 
men. He did a great many things for them not 
so much to help them, as to make them feel that 
He was ready to help them and that He would 
supply their deepest needs. This it seems to me 
is the meaning of such miracles as the feeding of 
the five thousand. Those people were not starv- 
ing. They could have gone home for their sup- 
per, or they could have gone supperless to bed 
without serious harm. But He provided the sup- 
per with the hope that some of them might be 
led to look to Him for the things they needed 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 117 


most. I do not mean that He had no desire to 
provide a supper for the supperless, but that was 
not the main thing; the main thing was to lead the 
people to feel that while He could satisfy all the 
hungry multitudes going supperless to bed, He 
was ready to satisfy a deeper hunger—the hunger 
of their souls. 

It was the one consuming desire of Jesus. The 
people were in great need. Never were people in 
greater need, and He had come richly supplied 
with everything they needed. If they could only 
be made to realise that He could really satisfy 
their needs! And so He went about among them 
holding out His hands filled with good things, in- 
viting them to come, trying to entice them by giv- 
ing them glimpses of the good things He had 
brought, and oftentimes scattering handfuls of 
blessings among them. How strange it seems to 
us that though they accepted the good things 
which He scattered among them—the healing of 
their sick, the cleansing of their lepers, the giving 
sight to their blind—how strange it seems to us 
that they should still stand aloof, shy, mistrusting, 
wondering whether they should have anything to 
do with Him! How strange it must have seemed 
to Him; how heartbreaking! ‘‘Can you not under- 
stand’’—you can almost hear Him say, as He di- 
vides the loaves and the fishes—‘‘Can you not 
understand, that I have come to satisfy all your 
needs, to fill the hungry soul with goodness?’’ 


118 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


IV 


Another obstacle in the way of understanding 
His teaching is our modern exaggerated idea 
of the value of physical comfort. There are ear- 
nest, hardworking men and women to whom the 
words of Jesus about taking no anxious thought 
for to-morrow sound like the visionary vapour- 
ings of a holy tramp. Here, indeed, is an intel- 
lectual as well as a spiritual obstacle. They have 
never learned, that while a few of the sayings of 
Jesus are like gems, which shine whether you 
leave them in their setting or take them out, most 
of them are like eyes: the moment you pull them 
out of their sockets the light is gone. I should not 
like to judge a man by his eyes if I had never seen 
them until a surgeon had cut them out and 
brought them to me; but that is the way these 
good people have judged the Master. That is the 
way most of us have judged Him at one time or 
another. 

If we would understand what Jesus meant when 
He urged His followers not to be anxious about 
to-morrow’s needs we must look at His words as 
we would look at a man’s eyes. That is, we must 
look at them in their sockets or connection. And 
this means something more than examining them 
in connection with the context. I cannot intelli- 
gently pass upon what I see in a man’s eyes by 
simply looking at them in connection with their 
immediate surroundings. The time of day might 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 119 


have something to do with the light that was in 
them. And the man himself would have more. To 
understand a man’s words I must take them in 
connection with the time in which they were 
spoken, and I must take them in connection with 
the man himself. d in the case of a man who 
spoke a language other than my own I must go 
further; I must not only take his sayings in con- 
nection with the time in which they were spoken, 
but I must take the translated words in connection 
with the time in which they were translated. 


Vv 


There are other obstacles in the way of under- 
standing the words of Jesus, but I shall mention 
but one more. I have said that in my schooldays 
I learned two things which I would not part with 
for the world. I did not get them out of a book; 
they were simply two bits of advice. One of them 
came from ‘‘Old Mang,’’ the boys’ friend. This I 
have already given. The other came from a pro- 
fessor of mathematics, affectionately known to 
the boys as ‘‘Old Fatty.’’ | 

One day, after giving the usual instructions 
about an examination we were about to enter, 
‘Old Fatty’’ said: 

‘‘Now, young gentlemen, let me give you a bit 
of advice. Here are ten problems. First, work 
those you can.’’? And with a twinkle in his eyes he 
added: ‘‘And then work those you can’t.”’ 


120 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


We boys smiled and then in our superior sopho- 
moric wisdom proceeded to follow our own coun- 
sel, which was to work the hardest problems first, 
while our minds were fresh. This seemed reason- 
able enough, but soon after I began I became con- 
fused, and in a little while I was in such a fever 
that I could make no headway. Then I tried an- 
other hard problem and another, with the same 
result. By and by I gave up the hard ones in de- 
spair and turned to the easy ones which I knew I 
could work. But the time was out. 

A few bitter experiences of this sort in the 
course of the next year or two persuaded me to 
try ‘‘Old Fatty’s’’ plan, and the results so im- 
pressed me with his wisdom that years after- 
wards when I was in trouble over my Bible, I be- 
gan to apply his advice to my Bible study. I had 
had the same trouble with the hard problems in 
my Bible. I had a habit of putting the hard prob- 
lems foremost and they were always in my way. 
My brain would get into such a fever in my efforts 
to crack the hard nuts that I would give up and 
lay the book aside before I had cracked the easy 
ones. And I was getting nowhere. When I fol- 
lowed ‘‘Old Fatty’s’’ advice in my examinations 
I found that while I was working the easy prob- 
lems my mind was opening up to my work, I was 
getting into the mathematical mood, getting more 
in harmony with. my subject, getting gleams of 
light here and there which would help me further 
on; and when I came to the hard problems I was 


DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY 121 


able to crack some of them. And when I tried the 
plan in my Bible study I found that it worked the 
same way. When I laid the hard problems of the 
story of Jesus aside and went on to master what 
I could master, I found that my mind was open- 
ing up to my work, I was getting more and more 
in harmony with it, I was getting better ac- 
quainted with Jesus, learning His ways of think- 
ing and speaking, getting more and more in har- 
mony with His will, and now and then when I 
ventured to try one of the hard nuts again I found 
that it was not as hard as I had thought. 

And now see what has happened. When I be- 
gan to try ‘‘Old Fatty’s’’ advice in my Bible 
study I did not reject those hard nuts; I simply 
set apart a shelf in my mind for them and put 
them out of my way so that I could go on with my 
work. Thirty years ago that shelf was piled to 
the top with nuts I had found too hard to crack. 
To-day—well, there are a good many there still; 
some of them will stay there; but there are not 
one-fourth as many on that shelf as there were 
twenty-five years ago. 

There is an interesting young ‘‘courting cou- ' 
ple’’ on the next block. At the beginning of every | 
week they quarrel, and before the end of the 
week, they make up. People say they are devoted 
to each other and wonder why they never under- 
stand each other. But those who know them well 
will tell you that it is merely a romance (a physi- 
eal attachment), and as there is no real love 


122 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


(which is an attachment of spirit) they have 
never come to know each other. If, after they 
marry, a real love should develop they will know 
each other better, and John will begin to say, ‘‘I 
understand Mary so much better now.’’ And if 
he should happen upon something which he can- 
not understand it will not matter much; he will 
say: ‘‘Well, Mary is a mystery, but she’s my 
Mary.”’ 

Don’t allow these things you cannot understand 
about Jesus to keep you from the things you can 
understand. Go on and get acquainted with Him. 
Give yourself to Him. Live with Him. Fall in 
with His will. Make His slightest wish your law. 
And when you come to know Him better you will 
find yourself saying: ‘‘I understand Him so much 
better now.’’ And if you should come upon some- 
thing you cannot understand it will not matter 
much. You will say: 

‘“Well, it’s a mystery, but He’s my Master.’’ 


VItt 
A WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 


T 


ET us assume that we have got rid of the 
intellectual obstacles of which I have 
spoken, and that we are now in a very 
serious mood—so serious that we have overcome 
for the moment the spiritual obstacles which still 
linger in our hearts. There is no longer anything 
in the way of either our intellectual or spiritual 
vision, and we have come into a quiet place where 
we can brood over the words of Jesus in the way 
I have suggested. How do his words impress you? 
As you close the Book I imagine I can hear you 
saying: ‘‘He doesn’t talk from a man’s point of 
view at all. He talks from the point of view of 
One whose vision sweeps both worlds at once. 
And that is God’s point of view.’’ 

That is true; and just here is the fundamental 
difference between the words of Jesus and the ut- 
terances of the highest human wisdom of all the 
ages. As you listen to Him you get many unusual 
impressions, but the most amazing of all is the 
feeling that comes to you that you are listening 
to One who is just as familiar with the world of 


spirit as He is with the world of matter. He is so 
123 


124 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


perfectly at home when He talks about the unseen 
that you never think of His words as uncanny. 
His Heavenly Father’s house is just as real, just 
as natural, as His mother’s humble home in 
Nazareth. He speaks of God as a man would 
speak of his own father whom he had seen at the 
breakfast-table an hour before. 

History contains no record of any other teacher 
who talked in this way. The wisest men of whom 
we have record never showed the slightest fa- 
miliarity with anything beyond the present life. 
Agnosties have called our attention to the last 
talk of Socrates and asked if it were not as lofty 
in every respect as the last talk of Jesus the night 
before His death. They have placed them side 
by side and examined them with their intellects 
alone and they are unable to see any striking dif- 
ference between them. But there is another test. 
Read that last talk of Socrates in a quiet place 
and then read the last talk of Jesus, and then note 
the impressions which they have made upon you. 

Listen to Socrates. He is talking about the 
world to which he is going. He says that he hopes 
to be with good men, but hastens to add that of 
this he is not confident. He does feel quite sure, 
however, that he will be with gods who are good 
governors. That is about all. How does he im- 
press you? You say at once that you see no dif- 
ference between his knowledge of the unseen and 
that of any other man. He is talking as every 
other man talks at such a time—before a closed 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 125 


door which he has never entered. It is perfectly 
plain that he is not familiar with his subject; he 
is only guessing. 

Now ‘listen to Jesus. Socrates hopes to find 
good men in the world to which he is going. In 
other words he does not know where he is going. 
Jesus says He is going back to the place from 
which He came—going back to the Father who 
sent Him. He speaks of the Father’s house with 
the familiarity of a son who has lived at home on 
familiar terms with his father, who has some 
rights there, and who is going home to get things 
ready so that his friends may come and be with 
him. Here is something absolutely unique both 
in history and literature. No other being ever 
impressed the world as a man whose vision swept 
both worlds at once. 

I am aware that there are earnest students who 
will insist that there is no essential difference be- 
tween the impression made by the words of Jesus 
and that made by the words of the best of the 
Hebrew prophets; but my answer to this is the 
same. One may not see the difference in a purely 
intellectual study, but one will realise the differ- 
ence if one will compare them in the way I have 
suggested. I think if you will make the test you 
will feel very much as the Galileans felt when 
they listened to the words of Jesus and then 
thought of the teachings of their rabbis. Jesus, 
they said, spoke as a man who had authority. 
How different from the scribes, who could only 


126 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


quote the authority of others! And they might 
have said practically the same thing of the proph- 
ets that they said of the scribes. None of the 
prophets claimed anything more than to be a 
mouthpiece of God. They simply passed on to 
men the utterances of One who was external to 
and infinitely above themselves. Jesus never re- 
garded Himself as a mouthpiece. He did say that 
He spoke only what His Father gave Him to 
speak, but that Father, He was bold to declare, 
was not external to Himself; in a very real sense 
He was in the Father and the Father in Him. 


II 


Just here those of my younger readers who 
have fallen in with the idea that to be modern in 
one’s thinking, one must be radical, will wish to 
remind me that I am quoting from the Gospel of 
John, which I must remember was written too late 
to be accepted as a reliable record of the words of 
Jesus, and that if we would get at the facts we 
must go to the earlier Gospels, preferably to that 
of Mark, the earliest of all. Let me say a word on 
this point before I pass on. 

The view that we should look to Mark rather 
than John for the truth about Jesus (which is 
usually given us with the gentle reminder that 
Mark, who wrote nearer to the time of Jesus did 
not regard Jesus ag divine at all), gave me no lit- 
tle trouble until one day, while comparing the two 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 127 


Gospels, I was struck with the remarkable dif- 
ference between the spiritual vision of their au- 
thors. That comparison settled the question. I 
said to myself: ‘‘The man who wrote the Gospel | 
of Mark had an eye for the facts, but the man who | 
wrote the Gospel of John had an eye for the truth. | 
If I wished to get at the material facts about the. 
life of Jesus I might prefer to go to Mark; but if 
I wished to get at the truth about Jesus Himself, 
—if I were longing to catch a vision of His mind 
and spirit—if I wanted to settle the question of 
divinity in Jesus, I would prefer to go to a book 
written by a man who, in the course of a long life 
of the most intimate comradeship with Christ, 
had developed a spiritual vision which was far 
beyond that of such men as Mark or Matthew or 
Luke.’’ When I compare the spiritual vision of 
John with that of any one of the other evangelists 
I am glad that John did not write until long after 
their time, 


III 


The impression which we get in reading the 
words of Jesus—the feeling that we are listening 
to one who though human is above human—is all 
the stronger when we place His sayings side by 
side with the best specimens of human wisdom 
which we possess. 

Here, for example, are our popular ideas of life. 
Place these ideas by the side of the Master’s views 
of life and compare them. I think I can safely 


128 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


say that if you will make this experiment when 
you are in a serious mood and in a quiet place you 
will get an impression that will make you blush 
for your race. You will say that the ideas of life 
which we humans have conceived smell of the 
earth—some of them indeed of the lower animals 
—while the idea of Jesus make you feel as if you 
had left the odours_of the barnyard to breathe the 
pure, fragrant air of heaven. 

Here is a very modern man—an excessively 
modern man—who, let us say, has succeeded in 
shutting out of his mind all the thinking of the 
world that has been influenced by the teachings of 
Jesus, and is now doing his own thinking without 
any aid from without. Let us listen to him as he 
gives utterance to his profoundest wisdom. 

He is talking about liberty. Liberty, he tells us, 
is the right to do as we please and the only way 
to get it is to break loose from all restraint. The 
human race, he is quite sure, will never amount to 
anything until it rises in its might and destroys 
all the bonds that men and women have tied about 
themselves, including parental authority, mar- 
riage vows, government, religion, and proceeds to 
follow its own natural inclinations from the cradle 
to the grave. Now turn to the teachings of Jesus 
in which He pictures true freedom, not as the 
liberty to go in any direction we please, but the 
liberty to rise toward our high destiny as sons of 
God. This liberty, He tells us, is something we 
get, not by cutting loose from all restraint, but by 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 129 


tying ourselves up to the things that are above us 
—the things that are high and pure and noble and 
true—that they may draw us upward and thus 
break the bonds which are really holding us down. 
We are slaves to evil; to the false; if we would be 
free we must tie ourselves up to the good and the 
true. ‘‘I am the truth,’’ He says. ‘‘Tie yourself 
up to me; follow me; follow me by following my 
truth; and as you try to follow my truth it will 
draw you—lI will draw you—away from the false 
to which you are bound, and your bonds will break 
and thus the truth—thus I who am the truth— 
will make you free. If the Son of man makes you 
free you will be free indeed. You will be able to 
follow me on, up to your divine destiny as a son 
oL God.’ 

Listen again. This very modern man likes to 
talk on scientific subjects. He has just said some- 
thing about the survival of the fittest. ‘‘Why 
not?’’ he asks. ‘‘Why should we not adopt this 
principle in everything in life? Here we are help- 
ing the unfit to survive and cluttering up the 
world with homes for incurables. How foolish! 
Why shouldn’t we gently chloroform all the unfits 
and misfits out of existence and give the world to 
those who are fit to live in it?’’ Now compare this 
specimen of unaided human wisdom with the 
teachings of Jesus, in whose eyes every human 
being, whether he has two legs or one, two eyes or’ 
none, is still a son of God, brought into existence 
for an immortal destiny. 


130 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


Listen again. The moderr. man is talking about 
what he calls this superstition about sin. There 
is no such thing as sin. What we call little John- 
ny’s badness is simply bad tonsils or adenoids, or 
possibly appendicitis. Bad people don’t need a 
religion, they need a surgeon’s knife. Now listen 
to the one Physician who knows us down to the 
very bottom of our being. All the evil that af- 
flicts humanity, He tells us, comes from the heart. 
T have long been impressed with the perfect sanity 
of Jesus, and I am quite sure that if He were here 
in the flesh to-day, He would tell us that physical 
evils often aggravate moral evils, and that if little 
Johnny shows signs of physical trouble he should 
be taken to the doctor; but I am equally sure that 
He would add that the bottom secret of Johnny’s 
badness is not in his nose nor his throat, but in 
his heart, and that we should also bring little 
Johnny to Him, who is the only Physician of the 
hearts of children, little or big. 

Turn again and listen to our modern thinker as 
he discourses upon the wisdom of living a per- 
fectly natural life, which he explains is the life we 
live when we follow our natural inclinations. He 
wonders at the folly of men in holding on to such 
a primitive, outworn superstition as marriage. 
All prohibitory laws, he informs us, are an out- 
rage upon humanity, and marriage is our most 
ancient prohibitory law. The only beautiful, safe 
and really moral life is a perfectly natural life. 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 131 


The pretty birds have no marriage laws, but 
change their mates every spring, and they are 
billing and cooing and pouring out their happiness 
in song all the day long. Why should we not be 
natural like the pretty birds? 

I have said that some of our ideas Hee the 
smell of the lower animals. This is one of them. 
Compare this idea, which we humans conceived 
by watching the birds, with the teaching of Jesus 
as He declares that marriage is a life-time union 
and that it is of God’s own planning. But let us 
go on. 

Again our modern thinker is talking about life. 
We are in this world for what we can get out of it. 
It is ours, anyway, and we have a right to all that 
is in it. After all, a man’s life consists in the 
abundance of things which he possesses. Now 
turn to the words of Jesus. 

Jesus tells us that a man’s life does not consist 
in the abundance of things which he possesses. 
The modern thinker has just said that it does, and 
[ imagine that a good many of us, deep down in 
our hearts, find ourselves in sympathy with him. 
At any rate, most humans spend their lives grasp- 
ing at things and they want an abundance of them. 
This, the modern thinker tells us, is the secret of 
happiness. He is not alone. Every generation 
from the beginning of the race has thought the 
same thing. Little Johnny, with the long-drawn 
whine, is confident that all that he needs to make 


132 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


him happy is a bicycle. He gets his bicycle and 
he is whining Johnny still. Mary believes that 
her little heart will be perfectly satisfied if she 
can only get that new dress with the pretty flower 
in it. She gets it and straightway begins to as- 
sure herself that her happiness depends upon a 
new hat to match. And Johnny’s and Mary’s 
father has been thinking all his life that if a man 
has money he can have anything, and all the while 
he has been getting money he has been getting 
poorer in mind, in heart, in the things which make 
for righteousness, in the capacity to enjoy life or 
to get anything out of it except more money. 

The world has never been able to point to a man 
who has been made happy by mere getting. 
Money-getters have been surfeited, but not satis- 
fied. It has been said that the most miserable 
women in society are the wives of multi-mil- 
lionaires who have not saved themselves from 
ennut by becoming absorbed in benevolent or 
charitable work. They have everything that 
money can buy and there is nothing to strive for, 
and they are tired. Not until they lose sight of 
themselves and their possessions and become ab- 
sorbed in some effort to help others do they begin 
to live. Happiness comes from within, not from 
without—from that which God puts into our 
hearts and not that which we gather around us. 
That, at least, is one meaning of the Beatitudes. 

Does Jesus teach us that we should be indiffer- 
ent to the things which make for our daily com- 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 133 


fort? No; but He would not have us indifferent 
about the things which make for our eternal com- 
fort. We are not to be careless about our bread- 
winning, but He would have us remember that life 
is more than meat. We are not to be improvident 
as to the present life, but our real, abiding concern 
should be for life eternal. Yes, money is a good 
thing in its place, but it does not belong in the first 
place. It is not worthy of the first place. How 
ean it be worthy of the first place in our hearts 
when there is so much that is better which we need 
to win? Life is the great thing. If money does 
not enrich life why should we place such a high 
estimate upon it? It should have our thought, but 
it should not have our anxious concern. There 
are better things which call for our best thought. 
It is not what we wish but what we need that 
counts. We wish to be rich, perhaps; but we need 
to be rich toward God. We wish a quiet home, 
but we need a quiet heart. We want to lay up 
treasures on earth, but we need to lay up treas- 
ures in heaven. We want to beautify our home, 
but we need to adorn our souls. We want more 
land, more stock, more bonds; but we need more 
love, more courage, more faith, more power for 
the job which God has given us to do. Little Mary 
wants a new dress, but her need is to be clothed 
with humility. She feels that she must have a 
new ring or a new pin, but her need is the orna- 
ment of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the 
sight of God of great price. 


134 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


IV 


But we are never so deeply impressed with the 
wisdom of Jesus in His teachings about this life 
as we are when we compare our thinking about 
the problems of life with His. Let us, for exam- 
ple, take two of the most serious problems the 
world is thinking about to-day. 

Here is the problem of war. Look back into the 
past and see what the best worldly wisdom has 
had to suggest about it. Here is a great quarrel 
dividing a nation—a quarrel about slavery, or 
State rights, or both. People have lost sight of 
Jesus as the light of men, and they have been 
seeking light from their leaders. And what are 
these leaders saying? They are saying that this 
thing has gone so far that it requires desperate 
measures. The people are sick and they have too 
much blood and there is nothing like the old-fash- 
ioned remedy: the patients must be bled. And the 
best way to do it is to take them out into a field 
and divide them into two opposing groups and 
put guns into their hands and let them bleed one 
another. Then when they have finished their work 
we can take everybody who is bleeding to the hos- 
pital and heal those who are not too far gone, and 
give them crutches and send them home. And 
when we have repeated the process enough to re- 
duce the blood on both sides to a safe point, and 
the people are pretty well cooled off, our leaders 
will put on their best clothes and their best swords 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 135 


and their best manners, and meet and bow to each 
other and shake hands. And then the band will 
play ‘‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’’ 

That seems to be about the highest point that 
human wisdom without aid from above has ever 
reached on the subject of war. Now what does 
Jesus say about it? If our honest but fevered 
fathers had asked that question and waited for an 
answer they would have heard Him saying in 
their hearts: ‘‘Sit down in this cool place and let 
us keep quiet awhile.”’ 

And they would have sat down and taken off 
their hats and cooled their fevered brows. And 
when their hearts had grown calm they would 
have heard Him say: 

‘You don’t know what spirit you are of. You 
don’t know who you are. You are not animals, 
you are spirits—sons of God with an immortal 
destiny, made to live for ever with God as your 
Father and with your fellow-men as your broth- 
ers. This is a family affair. Here you are, 
brothers, debasing yourselves in an unseemly 
quarrel right before your Father. There is but 
one thing that will hold a family together and that 
is sacrificial love—a love that puts the other first. 
A new commandment I give unto you, not that 
you love one another, but that you love one an- 
other as I have loved you—with a love that goes 
to the limit of sacrifice; a love unto death.’’ 

And then He would have left them to think it 
over. And very likely somebody would have said: 


136 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


‘‘He is right: let us follow Him. We are brothers 
and we must live together, and we cannot seal a 
union with the blood we draw from each other’s 
veins. Wecan seal it only with the blood we draw 
from our own veins; we must sacrifice—each for 
the other.”’ 

And they would have stepped up from the low, 
animal plane of selfishness to the high, spiritual 
plane of sacrificial love, where they would have 
found themselves in the presence of God; and in 
the light of His presence and with a sacrificial 


love warming their hearts they would have found 


the path to peace. 


V 


Here is our marriage problem. For twenty 
years or more, able experts, 'representing the 
highest human wisdom, have been studying’ sta- 
tistics and racking their brains for a divorce law 
or a programme of education that will save mar- 
riage and the home to the American people. In 
all this period our representatives of mere human 
wisdom have not been able to suggest anything 
beyond reforms in divorce laws, living conditions, 
and educational programmes. And every day the 
problem has been growing worse. Now compare 
these two suggestions for the preservation of 
marriage and home with the teachings of Jesus. 
Listen to Him. We have been trying marriage as 
a contract. That places it on the level of selfish- 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 137 


ness. Jesus asks us to accept marriage as a life- 
time union. That places it on the unselfish level 
of sacrificial love. Sacrificial love is the only thing 
that has ever been found that makes a real union 
possible. It is the only thing that can stand the 
wear and tear and strain of family life. Some- 
times indeed we experiment with marriage as a 
union, but often in such cases we start on a basis 
of romance alone, mistaking it for love, and so 
fail to reach the high level of sacrificial love, just 
as we do when we try marriage as a contract. For 
romance is not love; it is an attachment of the 
flesh, and love is an attachment of spirit. And 
romance is one of the most selfish things in the 
world. 

Stand in the light of these facts and listen to 
Jesus. Human wisdom has no suggestion to offer 
for the preservation of marriage as a union; it 
only suggests certain things that will in some 
measure relieve the evils which result from try- 
ing to live together in marriage as a contract. 
Jesus asks us to bring our lives in marriage as in 
everything else under the rule of sacrificial love— 
the kind of love that He has for us. ‘‘A new 
commandment I give unto you that ye love one 
another; even as I have loved you, that ye also 
love one another.’’ 

To realise just what this means one only needs 
to look at the solution offered by human wisdom 
and the solution offered by Jesus in the light of 
experience. Here is a young couple just starting 


138 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


in marriage on the basis which Jesus offers. 
There is, of course, a romantic attachment, but 
there is also a spiritual attachment. They have a 
spiritual love, which is always unselfish, always 
putting the other first, always seeking opportuni- 
ties to express itself in sacrifice. Now what hap- 
pens? Every morning as John goes downtown he 
is asking himself, ‘‘What can I do for Mary?’’ 
Twenty times a day he asks, ‘‘What can I do for 
Mary?’’ And Mary goes about her work around 
the house asking herself, ‘‘What can I do for 
John?’’ Twenty times a day she asks, ‘‘What 
ean I do for John?’’ And just so long as they 
keep their wedded life on that basis, their home is 
a little heaven, no matter whether the dresser in 
Mary’s room is a five-hundred-dollar antique or 
a flour barrel covered with cretonne. 

But one dark, drizzly morning, John gets up 
wrong side foremost. And when a man gets up 
wrong side foremost he begins to think backwards. 
And on his way downtown John begins to ask, 
not ‘‘What can I do for Mary?’’ but ‘‘What is 
Mary doing for me?’’ And the thing grows and 
grows, and being contagious, sooner or later Mary 
catches it; and one morning she starts about her 
work around the house muttering, ‘‘ What is John 
doing for me?’’ 

And the little heaven becomes a hell. 

There is but one step from heaven to hell in a 
home. All you have to do is to step down from 
the level of the sacrificial love of Jesus, where we 


WISDOM THAT IS FROM ABOVE 139 


ask, ‘‘What can I do for Mary?’’ to the level of 
selfishness, where we ask, ‘‘What is Mary doing 
for me?’’ 

When I compare the best that human wisdom 
offers for this problem with the teachings of 
Jesus, I feel as if I were comparing earth with 
heaven. Jesus is the one Teacher who has the ad- 
vantage of the light of heaven as well as the light 
of earth all along the way. He knows all that we 
know about ourselves, and if we will brood over 
his words in a quiet place we may come to the 
conclusion that He also knows all that our Maker 
knows about us. 


IX 


HIS SUPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF 
HUMAN NEEDS 


I 


HEN I compare the teachings of Jesus 
‘about man and his life in this world 
with the highest human wisdom, I think 
I know how Paul felt when he declared with an 
emphasis which seems almost like a gesture of 
contempt, that the wisdom of men was foolishness 
with God. That is the way it impresses me; even 
in matters relating to this earthly life the highest 
human wisdom is foolishness with the God we see 
in the face of Jesus Christ. But this impression, 
profound as it is, is as nothing compared to the 
impression I get of His knowledge and wisdom as 
I listen to His words about the things of the spirit. 
Here, also, the impression is deepest when I com- 
pare His ideas with the wisest reflections that 
have come to us from purely human sources. 
Take, for example, His ideas about what we call 
religion—something, by the way, which He never 
ealis by that name. We do not need to recall the 
erude religions of the ancients to realise the dif- 
ference. It becomes plain enough when we com- 


pare His religion as it is unfolded in the Gospels 
140 








SUPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE 141 


with any of the various and sundry revisions of 
Christianity which are being offered to us by lead- 
ing intellectuals of our day. 

Here are six distinguished scholars, all of them 
good men, most of them Christians, in one sense 
or another. Each of them is the champion of a 
religion which he calls the religion needed for the 
times. One of them tells us that what Jesus really 
came for was to make the world safe for democ- 
racy, and that Christianity is simply a plan to 
make the world safe for democracy. Another is 
quite as sure that Jesus had a simpler mission 
than that—that He came simply to make us hap- 
pier by making us kinder, and that His religion 
is only a matter of going out and giving your fel- 
low-man a lift. Still another—a tremendously 
earnest man—wishes that people could be made to 
understand that Jesus never had the slightest 
idea of making people pious; that what He wanted 
men to do was to stop their pious talk about clean 
hearts and get out into the world and work for 
clean streets, clean milk for babies, and clean city 
politics. The fourth man, who once donned over- 
alls and studied industrial problems at first hand 
until his heart was almost broken over what he 
saw, solemnly assures us that what Jesus came 
for was to rescue the oppressed from the oppres- 
sor, and that the great mission of Christians is to 
deliver the enslaved workingmen of the world 
from the tyranny of a capitalistic society. The 
fifth tells us that the mission of Jesus was to make 


142 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


the world fit to live in; while the sixth, more spe- 
cific, insists that the idea of Jesus was to make 
the world fit to live in by providing for the ma- 
terial needs and comfort of the race. 

Now let us turn from these teachers and listen 
to Jesus as He reveals His knowledge of human 
needs, and of how these needs can be met. What 
do you think of His knowledge and wisdom com- 
pared to the knowledge and wisdom of these six 
teachers? Perhaps you will say that the ideas of 
the six men are good enough as far as they go; 
and that is true. Also you may say that all of 
them put together do not cover the needs of men 
which are covered by the religion of Jesus; and 
that, too, is true. The religion of Jesus covers all 
that these religions offer, but it goes further and 
provides for the deepest needs of men, needs 
which the religions these men are offering us do 
not even recognise. That is the trouble with most 
of our modern revisions of Christianity; like the 
ancient pagan religions, they seek to provide for 
transient wants rather than for fundamental and 
eternal needs. 

As a matter of fact, they do not attempt to pro- 
vide for a single really deep need of our nature. 
We want to make the world safe for democracy, 
but we need to make our homes safe for love. We 
want clean streets, but we need—we are bound to 
have—clean hearts. We want honesty in city gov- 
ernment, but what we need—what we are bound to 
have—is honesty in the depths of our souls. We 


SUPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE 143 


want to give our business neighbour a lift, but 
just now there is a loved one at home whose back 
is almost broken under the burdens of life, and 
we are needing a religion that will help us to be 
as considerate of our loved ones at home as we 
are of our business friends downtown. We want 
to make the world fit to live in, but what we need 
is to be made fit to live init. And, of course, we 
ought to provide for the material needs of our 
fellow-men and do everything we can to smooth 
their path for them; but just now some of us are 
desperately in need of a religion that will help us 
to provide for the needs of the family next door 
that has no material needs at all but is about the 
neediest family we know. 

Those people next door have been healthy and 
prosperous all their lives, and they do not know 
what it is to have a material need. Yet the father 
of the family is a scoundrel, the mother is a 
painted butterfly, the daughter threatens to bring 
the family into disgrace, and the son—if I may 
use an unfragrant phrase of the street—is simply 
rotten. What has a religion that was designed 
for the material comfort of men to offer that 
family? What has it to offer the millions of 
Americans who to-day are making a good living 
but who don’t know how to live? 

And there are others. Yonder goes an endless 
procession of men whose backs and hearts are al- 
most broken under the burdens of life; not ma- 
terial burdens, but moral and spiritual burdens: 


144 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


skeletons in the family closet; wrecked homes; 
burdens that drive men to consider whether it 
would not be just as well to get a gun and end it 
all. What has your religion of material comfort 
to offer these men? ‘There goes another proces- 
sion—literally millions of women who started in 
life happy-hearted girls, every one of them, but 
who blundered, perhaps in marriage, and since 
that day life has been an endless chain of 
thwarted hopes and consuming griefs, and not one 
rose has bloomed along their desert road. What 
has your religion of material comfort to offer 
them? This very moment a hundred thousand 
gaunt and ghastly faces are pressed against the 
cold window pane of death, peering out into the 
darkness, trying to see what is beyond. What 
has your religion of material comfort to offer 
them? 

One might as well be frank. The ideas of re- 
ligion which are being taught to-day by men who 
have chosen the line of least resistance and re- 
vised Christianity to make it conform to the 
times, instead of helping the times to conform to 
Christianity, do not impress us as examples either 
of knowledge or of wisdom. These men are mak- 
ing the very same blunders that were made by the 
pagan leaders of old. They offer us a religion 
that is only ajob. They say, ‘‘Here’s your duty; 
go and doit.’’ They assume that men want to do 
their job and that they have the passion and 
power to do it, and then content themselves with 


SUPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE 145 


pointing men to their job. ‘‘Humanity is in need; 
go and pour out your life in a stream of service 
for humanity.’’ Jesus, who knows us better than 
we know ourselves, makes no such mistake. He 
nowhere offers us a religion that igs merely a job; 
He offers us something that gives us strength for 
our job. He does not tell us to go out and pour 
out our lives in a stream of service for humanity. 
He knows that we have no spring from which a 
stream of service can flow, and He bids us first 
come to Him and let Him give us a spring—‘‘a 
well of water springing up unto eternal life.’’ 


IT 


But this is not all. The highest worldly wis- 
dom has never gone beyond the idea of saving 
men by attaching them to a thing. All the re- 
ligions that we read about outside of the Bible 
are attempts to save or help men by attaching 
them to a thing—a form of worship, a system of 
belief, a philosophy, a mode of conduct, a pro- 
eramme of service. Even Christian leaders, when 
they lose their vision of Christ, seek to save men 
by attaching them to a thing. To Jesus, who saw 
that what men needed was life, this idea must 
have seemed utterly puerile. If men needed life 
it was foolish to try to save them by attracting 
them to a lifeless thing. They needed to be at- 
tached to something that had life. And so He 
came to do what no one else had ever attempted 


146 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


to do or thought of doing: He came to give men 
life by attaching them to a living Person—a Per- 
son who would not only be to them all that a per- 
fect example could be—an inspiration as well as a 
pattern to go by—but who would share with them 
all the way, His life—life for their spirits, His 
vital force, His love, His faith, His courage,—all 
that they would need for the job God had given 
them for this world and for whatever might await 
them in the world to come. 

In another chapter I shall try to present the 
religion of Jesus in a picture that will be so plain 
that a child can understand it; but the little 
elimpse I have just given is sufficient for our 
present purpose. Place the modern thinker’s idea 
of religion by the side of the general idea of Jesus 
and compare them. What do you see? I think 
you will notice at once, if you have never noticed 
it before, that the modern thinker, in suggesting 
the kind of religion we need, is not thinking of the 
needs of human beings at all; he is thinking of 
what he conceives to be the needs of our times, 
our civilisation, our society. On the other hand, 
Jesus is not looking at our times or our civilisa- 
tion or our society. He is interested in bringing 
human beings into the Kingdom of God—bringing 
them under the rule of God, bringing them into 
the family of God where they belong. Men are in 
a bad way. They are the Father’s children, but 
they don’t know it, and when the Father speaks 
to them they don’t recognise His voice. They be- 


SUPERHUMAN KNOWLEDGE 147 


long in the Father’s kingdom—the Father’s 
family,—but they don’t know it, and they don’t 
have anything to do with the family. They are 
like that unnatural son Tom, who seems to have 
been born without any natural affection; who has 
no use for his father, who has never realised 
that he is his father, but thinks of him as ‘‘the 
old man,’’ ‘‘the governor,’’ ‘‘the family purse,”’ 
and who, because he does not know the head of 
the family as his father, does not love the children 
of the family as his brothers or sisters. He comes 
and goes, but not as a member of the family. 
He recognises no obligations to the family. The 
family is not his family. The home is not his 
home. He comes to it only to eat and sleep. It’s 
the ‘‘old man’s’’ boardinghouse and he is beating 
the ‘‘old man’’ out of his board. 

What hope is there for that boy? What does he 
need? What must happen to him—what must be 
done for him to bring him to his place in the 
family, that he may fall in with his father and 
brothers and sisters and begin to amount to some- 
thing? 

If you will listen closely to Jesus as He talks 
with men about the Father, you will find that He 
is thinking of them just as we would think about 
that unnatural boy Tom. And when you look at 
what we call His plan of salvation you will see 
that it is His answer to the question we ask about 
Tom. He has looked beneath our times, our eivili- 
sation, our society to the depths of our souls, and 


148 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


He has found just wherein we are lacking, and 
has come with a plan to bring us—unnatural chil- 
dren—to our senses, to make us over, to lead us 
to our place in the Father’s family that we may 
have a chance to amount to something, to achieve 
our divine destiny as real sons in the Father’s 
family. 

When I go over the whole plan of Jesus and 
brood over it until it looms up clearly before me 
like a picture, I feel that I am gazing upon a wis- 
dom compared with which the highest earthly 
wisdom is foolishness. The wisdom of the world 
is not only foolishness with God; it is foolishness 
with us when we look upon the wisdom of God, as 
we see it in the teachings of His Son. 


TIT 
HIS INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 


I 


Ii get another impression of the divine 

VW in the knowledge and wisdom of Jesus 

when we read—rather, when we brood 
over—His sayings about God. I do not think that 
anyone who has tested this will question it. At 
such moments the divine wisdom in the Master’s 
words becomes as apparent as the human foolish- 
ness which we come upon in the words of worldly 
men about God. 

Listen for a moment to the highest human wis- 
dom on the subject of the providence of God. To 
the worldly wiseman of to-day the idea that God 
really cares is simply an ancient superstition. To 
the highest wisdom among the ancient heathen 
it was a wish or hope rather than a fixed belief. 
Sometimes a wise heathen would try to assure 
men that God cared for them because he was their 
creator, but it seldom worked. The ancient 
Hebrew teachers assured their people that God 
cared for them because they were His peculiar 
people, and that would work—until there was a 
succession of crop failures, and then the people 


would turn their backs upon Jehovah and seek 
149 


150 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


help from one of the heathen Baals—the Baal 
who was supposed to have charge of the harvest. 

Now listen to Jesus. Here is a word that is so 
simple that the modern man can hardly refrain 
from smiling at it, but when we brood over it we 
come to the conclusion that it is the only worth- 
while word that has ever been spoken on the sub- 
ject. It may not appeal to our minds while we 
keep our hearts closed, but when our hearts as 
well as our minds are open, we find that it appeals 
to both. 

Let us try to put ourselves in the place of those 
simple, anxious Galilean hearers, to whom God 
_was little more than an absentee ruler. Jesus 
would awaken a new hope in their hearts. ‘‘Why, 
of course, God cares for you,’’ He says to them. 
‘‘God is your Father.’’ 

It is impossible to miss His meaning. Caring is 
a parent’s business. That’s what parents are for. 
They put their children first. If a famine should 
come to this land and you had but a single dry 
crust left in your house, would you not press that 
dry crust into the hand of your little child and 
stand before him and smile upon him as he ate it 
every bit? And think you that you are a better 
father than your Father in heaven? 

Notice how this simple word of faith impresses 
you. Ifa friend should introduce me to an audi- 
ence as a man who cares for his own, I should not 
feel that he had paid me a very high compliment. 
Such praise might satisfy a youngster, but I am 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 151 


a father, and no father would like to hear people 
say that he cares for his own children. It is too 
much like saying that he ig not a thief or a loafer. 
For there is not a true father in all the world who 
does not agree with Paul that he who provides 
not for his own is a terribly bad man. 

Here is the key to this whole problem of provi- 
dence. So long as we think of God merely as God, 
we have a hard time trying to assure ourselves 
of His loving care; but if we would think of Him 
as Jesus asks us to think of Him, the question 
would be settled forever. We never find it neces- 
sary to assure ourselves that our Heavenly 
Father cares for His own; we only find it neces- 
sary to assure ourselves that a God whom we do 
not think of as a father, cares for His own. 

When Jesus came He found the world full of 
people who were thinking of God as unnatural 
children think of their father. An unnatural child 
never thinks of his father as his father. To his 
mind a father is simply the family moneybag, or 
the man who will be ‘‘awfully mad’’ when he 
comes home and finds that he has been bad. And 
so he is never quite sure about him. Sometimes 
he feels sure about himself and at such times he 
drives away anxiety by assuring himself that he 
ean ‘‘work the old man’’ for what he wants; but 
he is never sure of him. Who can be sure of a 
man who is nothing but a moneybag with a gift 
for getting mad when a boy is bad? 

Jesus saw people going to God just as an un- 


152 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


natural child goes to the father whom he never 
thinks of as his father. It horrified Him. How 
strange that men should go to His Father with 
anxiety written all over their faces! How strange 
that they should think of His Father as a rich 
stranger whom they might possibly ‘‘work’’ for 
what they needed if they could only manage to get 
into His good graces! ‘‘Why,’’ I can hear Him 
saying, ‘‘what does this mean? Why do you 
treat my Father as if He could not be trusted? 
He is not a rich stranger; He is my Father, and 
He is your Father. Can’t you trust your Hea- 
venly Father? When you were dependent upon 
your earthly father for your daily food, did you 
consume your soul with anxiety over your bread 
problem? And you who are fathers—don’t you 
trust yourselves to do your best for your chil- 
dren? If you—imperfect as you are—know what 
is best for your children and can trust yourselves 
to do your best for them, can you not trust your 
Heavenly Father, who has the power to do all that 
His infinite love and wisdom may prompt Him to 
do?’’ 

The fact is that God is our Father, and that fact 
alone settles the question of God’s care for His 
own. If I don’t know God as my Father nothing 
could make me sure of His care; if I know Him 
as my Father I shall have no doubt of His care. 
For, caring for one’s own is not only a father’s 
business, but as Jesus teaches, a father’s very 
nature. 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 153 


Ti 


Again, compare the ideas which we have con- 
ceived about the way to find God with the ideas 
of Jesus. The modern thinker who is seeking 
God, is having a hard time. He has been trying 
to reason out God, trying to find something in 
philosophy that will suggest a path to God, try- 
ing to track God through nature, as a man would 
track an animal through a forest; and if you ask 
him what he has found he will shake his head 
wearily and change the subject. Itis an old story 
and as pitiful as itis old. Wise men of the world 
have always tried to find God by searching for 
Him with their physical and intellectual eyes 
alone. And, usually, they have found nothing but 
trouble for their pains. Even we modern Chris- 
tians find nothing but trouble when we try to set- 
tle our questions about God according to our own 
wisdom. Jesus comes to us with a plan the world 
never dreamed of. He says to us in effect: ‘‘ You 
ean’t find God that way. You would not recognise 
His footprints if you saw them. And if you came 
to Him you could not see Him. I have come to 
offer you a better way. Instead of going over the 
world to find God, come to me. Fall in with me. 
Live with me. Make my will your will. Do as 
you see me do. Make me your comrade, your 
guide, your inspiration, your source of supply. 
Open your hearts to me and listen to my words. 
And without trying to reason out God at all, you 


154 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


will come to know Him. For the Father is in me, 
and when you see my love you see the Father’s 
love; and when you learn my will you learn the 
Father’s will; and when you realise my power 
you realise the Father’s power.’’ 

To fully realise the divine wisdom in this plan 
of Jesus, we only need to think of it in connection 
with our own mental struggles to arrive at a satis- 
fying view of God. In a wonderfully vivid pic- 
ture that has just come up to me from the past, 
whether from my dream life or my real life, I 
shall not undertake to inquire—I can see myself 
lying upon my bed one night in my youth fever- 
ishly struggling to account for a strange, dis- 
tressing feeling, apparently a deep yearning in 
my heart for something on which my very life 
seemed to depend. Perhaps it is only the memory 
of adream. Let us call ita dream. I remember 
I grew quiet at last and turned over toward the 
window and looked out at the stars. And instantly 
it came again. Something in those stars— 

Was it God? Was it true as that preacher had 
said—that red-headed, blue-eyed preacher who 
had got so close to me—that there was something 
in me that was hungry for God? And that sooner 
or later I would find that it would have to be satis- 
fied? 

But I could not convince myself that I was 
yearning for God. Ino longer had that strangely 
bitter feeling toward Him which I had in my child- 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD = 155 


hood, but I could not honestly say that I felt any 
special interest in Him. My conscience smote me 
as I thought of it. I knew that I ought to yearn 
for Him, and as I lay there I tried to warm to- 
ward Him. But I found it impossible; when I 
thought of him apart from my mother he was too 
cold. At last my thoughts turned toward Jesus 
and it occurred to me, that while I always lost 
interest in God the moment I ceased to think of 
my mother, I never lost interest in Jesus. My 
heart would warm toward Him whether I was 
thinking of my mother or not. 

My anguish had now passed away and again I 
lay still looking at the stars. I tried to unravel 
my confused ideas about God and Jesus. If the 
two were indeed one why should my heart go out 
toward one and not toward the other? It seemed 
to me that my thoughts about God and Jesus were 
so different from the thoughts of other people. 
So many people were easily satisfied about God, 
but not about Jesus, while I was easily satisfied 
about Jesus but not about God. I knew that I 
could not think of them as one so long as they ap- 
peared so different, but why did they appear so 
different? For a long time I lay looking at the 
two pictures, as they existed in my mind, and try- 
ing to account for them. It was plain that my 
mental picture of Jesus was formed first. The 
first outlines must have been drawn by my 
mother. But later my father came to her help, 


156 WHY I BELIEVE IN aS 


and the Quiet Lady across the satis may also 
have had a hand in it. 

It was also plain—and this interested me 
ereatly—that my picture of Jesus had remained 
practically unchanged down to the present. 

But I was not so sure about my picture of God, 
which, it seemed to me, had been changing all my 
life. I could not begin to count the changes which 
God had passed through in my mind. I remem- 
ber distinctly how He looked the first time I 
thought I saw Him. I must have been very small. 
I was out in the backyard one day and I looked up 
at the sky, and there was a great pile of white 
clouds, and He was sitting among them—a great, 
white-haired man with a long, snowy beard. He 
had a benevolent look and I knew that He must 
be kind to little boys. A little later God became 
a king—a great king who sat on a high throne and 
had a crown on His head. And I no more thought 
of Him as one who must be kind to little boys. 
Then, one day the king disappeared, and in His 
place I saw an Awful Eye. Then He became a 
king again—the terrible Scare King of my old 
black mammy’s inherited theology. I could see 
plainly now that it came from my old mammy’s 
theology and not from her heart. 

Then God became a policeman, who was always 
watching to catch bad boys in their meanness. 
Then He seemed to turn to something like Uncle 
Richard, the meanest righteous man I ever knew. 
And so on. I could not clearly make out the 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD _ 157 


changes after that, but He seemed to become less 
terrible and I imagine that I could trace a grow- 
ing air of indifference. But I may have been mis- 
taken, for the pictures were now rapidly becom- 
ing more and more blurred. Some of the pictures 
I was sure were composites which my imagina- 
tion had constructed out of symbolical pictures 
which I had happened upon in the old Family 
Bible, which I thought bore the finger marks of 
that hard, unforgiving Uncle Richard. Uncle 
Richard was fond of reading about the God who 
dwelt among the thick clouds of Sinai, and I al- 
ways thought he would have been better satisfied 
if the God of Elijah had been in the mighty wind 
that rent the mountains and in the fire and in the 
earthquake, rather than in the still small voice 
which followed that awful spectacle. 

Just then the utter absurdity of it all fell upon 
me and I laughed bitterly. No wonder I had 
found it hard to believe in God. Who could be- 
lieve in a God who was now a benevolent old gen- 
tleman, now a king, now an Awful Eye, now a 
policeman, now an Uncle Richard? I should have 
been ashamed to let a pagan see what I had been 
trying to worship. Pagans did believe in some- 
thing, and here I was trying to worship nothing. 
Absolutely nothing! How strange that no one 
had ever told me_a better way! How strange that 
not a single teacher I ever had had told me that 
the way to find the true God, a God I could feel 


158 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


like worshipping, was to go to Jesus; that Jesus 
had come to reveal to us a God we could not only 
worship but could actually love! For years and 
years I had been trying to take this queer com- 
posite picture for God when I might have taken 
Jesus. Jesus was the only picture of God I had 
ever seen that satisfied my inner being—the only 
picture that I thought looked as God ought to be 
—what my inmost something told me that God 
must be. He, and He alone, expressed God to me. 

Why should I not accept as God the Spirit I 
could see in that Man, and who satisfied my intel- 
lect as well as my heart, instead of this miserable 
composite structure which I had made up from 
here, there and everywhere, and which had never 
satisfied either? Why should I keep on strug- 
gling to get a satisfactory idea of God when I 
could look into the face of Jesus and see One who 
answered every detail of my heart’s picture of 
God? ‘‘Is it not reasonable,’’ I asked myself, ‘‘to 
suppose that the Man of the Gospels is a more re- 
liable likeness of God than any of these crude 
pictures which I have made out of little bits of 
nonsense I have picked up from everywhere? 
Why, after all, should I not put aside this crude 
composite in my mind, and look for God in the 
face of Jesus Christ?’’ 

We never settle our questions about God until 
we give up trying to find Him by our own methods 
and fall in with this simple plan of Jesus. 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD = 159 


Tit 


We get still another impression of divinity in 
the knowledge and wisdom of Jesus when we 
brood over His sayings about Himself. Here we 
catch a vision of His self-consciousness which is 
_ wholly unlike anything that has ever been discov- 
ered in any other being. Nowhere do we find the 
slightest indication of confusion or questioning in 
the mind of Jesus in regard to Himself. His con- 
sciousness of Himself is as clear as a sunbeam. 
He realises his kinship with us; He is just as con- 
scious of a more intimate kinship with God. 
There is an almost naive simplicity in the way He 
exhibits his consciousness of Himself. You have 
heard a little child say, with perfect frankness 
and without the slightest trace of vanity, or pride, 
or spirit of boastfulness, ‘‘I know I’m beautiful.’’ 
Listen to Jesus and note the childlike frankness 
and simplicity with which He makes far greater 
claims. Without the slightest gesture of pretence 
or of boasting, but in the same spirit in which He 
told us that He came as a servant—came not to 
be ministered unto but to minister—He tells us 
that He is greater than the prophets, that He does 
His wonders by the power of God (rather ‘‘the 
finger of God’’), that He has authority to forgive 
sin, that He came to redeem us, that He came to 
give us life—eternal life—that the Father has de- 
livered all things into His hands, that He is Lord 
of all things, that He has angels at His command, 


160 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


that He will come to judge the world. He de- 
clares before the court in perfect simplicity of 
spirit that He is the Son of God. He tells us that 
He is in the Father and the Father in Him, that 
He that has seen Him has seen the Father. With- 
out the slightest affectation, without playing a 
part, He declares His pre-existence. Listen! 
‘Before Abraham.was Iam.’’ Listen! ‘‘Father, 
glorify thou me with the glory which I had with 
thee before the world was.’’ 

You say that I am quoting from John and that 
you are not sure about John. Very well, listen! 
‘Of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when — 
he cometh in his own glory and in the glory of the 
Father.’’ You say, ‘‘That also is from John.’’ 
No; it sounds like John, but it is in Luke. ‘‘No 
one knoweth who the Son is save the Father and 
who the Father is save the Son, and he to whom- 
soever the Son willeth to reveal him.’’ That, too, 
sounds like John, but it is not in John; it is in 
Luke. ‘‘And they shall see the Son of man com- 
ing on the clouds of heaven with power and great 
glory and he shall send forth his angels.’’? That 
surely is as great a claim as we find in John; but 
it is not in John; it is in Matthew. 

But this is not all. In all ages, the purest and 
noblest men have had the deepest sense of their 
own sinfulness. Job, in the presence of his critics, 
felt that he was a good man, but when God spoke 
to him, he cried, ‘‘I will lay my hand upon my 
mouth.’’ Isaiah, I am sure, had a good opinion 


INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 161 


of himself. He was a man of the city and appar- 
ently at home in kings’ courts. But when in the 
Temple he saw that wonderful vision of Jehovah 
sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, he cried 
out, ‘‘ Woe is me, for Iam undone; for I am a man 
of unclean lips.’’ Paul facing his critics did not 
hesitate to declare that he was not one whit behind 
the chiefest of the apostles; but Paul with the im- 
age of Christ before his eyes cried out, ‘‘I am the 
chief of sinners.’’ But, as has been often said, 
Jesus, whether in the presence of God or man, 
never exhibited the slightest consciousness of sin, 
of any failure, any defect in Himself; never felt 
the slightest regret for anything He ever said or 
did. He called on others to repent, but never 
repented Himself. He taught others to seek for- 
giveness, but never sought forgiveness for Him- 
self. ‘‘Who of you convicteth me of sin?’’ The 
world never conceived of such a man before. 
Even to His enemies this picture of One who 
walks with us as our kin, yet all the while shows 
that he is conscious of a closer kinship with the 
Father, is a hopeless mystery. 

When I look through His life and find not one 
spot, one blemish, anywhere, I feel like crying out 
with the prophet John: ‘‘Look! The Lamb of 
God—the spotless sacrifice of God—that taketh 
away the sin of the world.”’ | 


XI 
THE GREATEST REASON OF ALL 


I 


NOW come to what has long been to me the 
I most satisfying reason of all for believing in 
Jesus. I have said that I believed in Him 
when I was a child because of what I saw, or 
thought I saw of Him in the lives of those in whom 
He lived, beginning with my mother. Later, L 
found another reason for believing in Him in what 
I learned of His life in the Gospels—that is, when 
I was no longer content to stop with analysing the 
story, but undertook to grasp it as a whole for the 
purpose of getting at His mind and spirit. I 
found a third reason in what I learned of His 
character in the Gospels by the same method, and 
a fourth in what I learned of His knowledge and 
wisdom by the same method. But I did not find 
the best reason of all until I came to a time when 
the exigencies of life practically forced me to cast 
my all upon Him as my only hope. When I made 
that venture I came into an experience with Him 
which enabled me to say: 
I believe in Him because I know Him; because 


I have come to know the Lord and Saviour and 
162 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 163 


Life-giver and Guide of men as my Lord and 
Saviour and Life-giver and Guide. 

The followers of Jesus, all the way from Paul 
to our fathers of a generation ago, were very 
frank. They did not hesitate to refer to them- 
selves as living witnesses to the power of Christ 
to meet the needs of men. One naturally shrinks 
from this sort of thing in our day—an age which 
regards frankness about the body and everything 
that relates to the body as a sign of courage, and 
frankness about the experiences of the soul as a 
sign of weakness; but I doubt whether there has 
ever been a time since the days of Paul when 
frank testimony to the power of Christ was needed 
more than it is to-day. A woman of high culture 
said to me not long ago: ‘‘I am so glad you gave 
us that little glimpse of your personal experi- 
ence. Do you know that that is what lay people— 
those of us who read—are needing to-day more 
than anything else? So many of us are all to 
pieces; we just don’t know where we are or what 
to believe, and our Christian leaders are so reti- 
cent nowadays, that we don’t know where they 
are. And we people who are in trouble need to 
know.”’ 

In recent years practically the whole civilised 
world has fallen in with the scientific teaching 
that experiment (or experience, which is the same 
thing) is the basis of knowledge, and the first thing 
that people ask when we offer them something we 


164 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


want them to believe, whether it be a scientific 
theory or a religion is, ‘‘Have you experimented 
with it?’’ or, ‘‘What has been your experience 
with it?’? And they will no more accept a re- 
ligion which you cannot back up with experience 
than they will accept a scientific theory which you 
eannot back up with experiment. There was a 
time when people listened to the preacher with 
exclamation points in their eyes. They said, 
‘<Isn’t it wonderful!’’ But, to-day, they are lis- 
tening to him with interrogation points in their 
eyes. They are saying: ‘‘Did you get that out 
of a book or do you know it of yourself?”’ 

This is why I have not been satisfied to confine 
myself to what I have got out of a book. I realise 
that people have a right to know whether I am 
offering them second-hand knowledge or what I 
know of myself, and I am glad that I can meet this 
demand. I am glad that I can say, ‘‘I know whom 
I have believed.’’ 

I ask that you will not yield to the impulse to 
close your ears to this frank testimony because of 
its seeming immodesty or its uncanny sound. As 
for its immodesty, that does not trouble me now 
that I am living in the midst of a generation that 
is hardly in a position to cast the first stone; and 
as for its uncanniness, one need only remind one- 
self that the fact that a thing sounds uncanny does 
not necessarily mean anything more than that it 
is unfamiliar. 


I watched a girl adding groups of figures and 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 165 


announcing the results almost in an instant. She 
seemed positively uncanny. But she was not un- 
canny : she had been led by an exigency of life into 
a work which demanded rapid figuring, and she 
had only achieved what perhaps I might have 
achieved under similar circumstances. So when 
I say, as I have just said, that I know Jesus, it 
does not mean that I am in any sense unnatural; 
it only means that I have been led by the 
exigencies of life into a position in which my 
spiritual vision has had a chance to develop. 
It would have been strange if that girl, in the 
position into which she had been thrown, had 
failed to develop a vision for figures that was be- 
yond my own; it would have been just as strange, 
if I, in the position into which I was thrown, had 
failed to develop a spiritual vision that was be- 
yond hers. As I look back over the unusual ex- 
periences of my life I cannot see how any man 
whose mind and heart were open toward Christ— 
who had the will to believe—could have gone 
through them without reaching the point where 
he could say, as I say to-day: ‘“‘I know 
Him.?’’ 

Conscious as I am of Him and of what He has 
done for me, I do not feel that I would be true 
either to Him or to myself if I should close this 
book without giving at least a brief testimony to 
His power to provide for the deepest needs of 
men. 

What are the deepest needs of men? 


166 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


It 


Let us imagine that you and I are sitting alone 
in a quiet place watching a beautiful sunset. 
Beautiful sunsets awaken tender memories, memo- 
ries of loved ones gone before, and these memories 
awaken thoughts of God, and when we begin to 
think of God we begin to think of ourselves, our 
blunders and our failures; and you and I have 
been thinking until our hearts have begun to 
ache, and now we have begun to talk just to re- 
heve the ache. 

You say to me: ‘‘Out in the hurly-burly of 
life I feel that I am literally overwhelmed with 
problems, but in a quiet place like this I am con- 
scious that after all I have but one problem. I 
haven’t life enough to live; that’s my trouble. I 
am not strong enough for my job. I have enough 
physical strength, enough mental strength, per- 
haps, but I have no vital force in my spirit; I 
am not strong enough to do the things I know I 
ought to do, to speak the word I ought to speak, 
to endure the things I ought to endure, to over- 
come the things I ought to overcome. What can 
I do?’’ 

And I begin to tell you of some men and women 
I happen to know who are strong enough for their 
job; not people of unusual talents or advantages, 
but just plain, everyday people, who do not differ 
from the rest of us except in one thing. They 
have a secret. And you ask me for their secret. 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 167 


And I say to you: ‘‘Do you remember that won- 
derful man who was here some months ago? Do 
you remember what you said to me about him? 
You said that you would give anything in the 
world if your boy could have the privilege of 
living in intimate touch with such a wonderful 
character. What does that mean? It means that 
you feel that the secret of life is more life; that 
what your boy needs is enough vital force in his 
spirit to enable him to do the job God has given 
him to do in the world, and that the best way for 
him to get it is to get in intimate comradeship 
with someone who has an abundance of the vital 
force he needs. And you are right. If you will 
look over this community you will find that there 
are just two kinds of people in it; those who are 
strong enough to do the things they ought to do 
and those who are not. And if you will look into 
the lives of those who are strong enough for their 
job you will find that not one of them is doing his 
work by his own strength alone. Here is the 
secret of the strong. And here is the answer of 
Jesus to your question. 

‘< ¢T know what you need,’ He says tous. ‘You 
need life. You have enough life in your body and 
mind, but you have no life in your spirit. I came 
that you might have life. Now come to me and 
let me connect you up with the great Source of 
Life—your Heavenly Father. You ask, where is 
the Father? You cannot see Him; but come to 
me. J amin the Father and the Father in me. If 


168 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


you will fall in with me you will fall in with Him. 
If you will put yourself in my hands you will be 
in His hands. If you do my will you will do His 
will. If you keep your whole being open to me, 
it will be open to Him; and just as the branch 
which lives in vital union with the vine, keeping 
its pores open to the vine, receives from the vine 
the life that it needs to bear fruit—to do its job 
in the world,—so you will receive your life from 
me—from the Supreme Source of Life in Me— 
and thus will be able to bear fruit—to do your job 
in the world. For i from me ye can do 
nothing.’ ’’ 


TIT 


If you should speak of this teaching of Jesus to 
a man who is doing his thinking about religion in 
a materialistic atmosphere, he will probably tell 
you that it is all mystical nonsense; that mysti- 
cism is out of date, that what we need is a religion 
that will make this world fit to live in, and that 
every man who is a man is strong enough for his 
job, and can do his job, if he will only accept the 
moral teachings of Jesus and catch the inspiration 
of His example and go forward. 

Of course medieval mysticism—this queer thing 
that we associate with trances and visions—is out 
of date and we can well afford to do without it; 
but every man who responds to God, who is con- 
scious of God, who in some degree lives in touch 
with God is a mystic in the true sense, and true 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 169 


mysticism is the very essence of religion. As for 
the rest, it may be well to remind ourselves that 
with regard to Jesus we have to-day two offers 
and only two. Teachers who have lost their vision 
of the divine Christ in Jesus are offering us what 
they have left—a purely human Jesus who died 
nearly two thousand years ago, bequeathing to us 
vast treasures of wisdom and a perfect example. 
The Book offers us a human-divine Jesus, a living 
Christ in whom there is an inexhaustible supply 
of life and strength—everything that a man needs 
for his job,—and this Jesus, instead of simply 
offering us an example to follow, offers with His 
example a sufficient supply of strength to follow 
it. If we are going to choose Jesus at all we must 
fall in with one of these offers. There is no other. 
Which shall we choose? Is life, as we find it to- 
day, such an easy problem that we can safely 
plunge into it with nothing more than an example 
to follow? Shall we choose an example alone 
when we have a chance at that same example plus 
the life which he offers for our spirits—a divine 
life expressing itself in faith, love, courage, power 
—everything that we need to follow that example? 

Jesus finds men standing alone, recognising no 
ties, except those of blood, insisting that they are 
their own and have the right to do as they please, 
regardless of God or man. It has never occurred 
to them that in that position they cannot do any- 
thing—that they are failing as completely as a 
star would fail if it should refuse to recognise the 


170 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


ties which bind it to its orbit and go off to live its 
own life. What do these men need? Watch Jesus 
at His work. Here is a man who is drawn to him. 
Immediately Jesus seeks to make him His com- 
rade. If the man will live in intimate touch with 
Him, keeping his mind and heart open to Him, he 
will come to know and love and obey Him, and 
thus will come to know and love and obey the 
Father that is in Him. And when, having come 
to know God as his Father, he turns to look into 
the faces of his fellow-men—God’s other children 
—he will see that they are his brothers, and he 
will fall in with them as his brothers. Thus Jesus 
connects him up on the one side with God, the 
Supreme Source of Life, so that he can get the 
life—vital force, love, faith, courage, everything 
that he needs for his work in life—and then con- 
nects him up on the other side with his fellow- 
men so that he can use what he receives from the 
Supreme Source of supply in helping his brothers 
in accordance with God’s will and plan. 

This is the religion of Jesus, and question it as 
we may, it is the religion of the Gospels, the re- 
ligion of Paul, of Augustine, of all the great 
leaders of the Church through the ages, all the 
men of great moral and spiritual power who have 
led in the upbuilding of the Kingdom of Christ, 
all the great missionaries of modern times, all the 
great leaders of our own time, such as Phillips 
Brooks and Dwight L. Moody and William Booth, 
each of whom had more spiritual power than a 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 171 


hundred thousand ordinary men; and last, but by 
no means least, it has been the religion of all the 
high-type Christian mothers I have ever known 
or heard of. 

We might as well face the truth: this world owes 
about all that it has in it that is eternally worth 
while to the mercy of God, and heroic Christian 
mothers, and a few men and women, most of whom 
learned mother’s religion at mother’s knee. 

Why is it that a high-type Christian mother is 
the best there is? There are just two reasons. 
In the first place, if a mother does her duty her 
life is a living sacrifice, and that is the life which 
Jesus lived. After all, what is mother but a beau- 
tiful bundle of loving sacrifice? 

In the second place a mother’s heart-burdens 
are so heavy that they almost drive her into com- 
radeship with Christ. She must go to Him or her 
heart will break. Mother gets the house quiet 
and sits down to put the baby to sleep in the old- 
fashioned way. Presently she looks down into 
the little face in the stillness and her heart begins 
to ache. She is thinking of that little fellow’s fu- 
ture. She picks up a little hand and fondles it 
and something sends a dagger through her heart. 
She has caught a vision of the hard work that 
little hand has got to do. She picks up a little foot, 
fondles it, and again a dagger pierces her heart. 
She has caught a vision of the steep, stony path 
those little feet have got to tread. At such a mo- 
ment what can a mother do? To whom can she — 


172 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


go? And so her heart cries out to her only Help; 
and thus she finds her way into that comradeship 
which makes her life of loving sacrifice the most 
beautiful thing in the world. 


IV 


Let me see if TE can give you the religion of 
Jesus in a picture. 

Let us imagine that you and I are taking a walk 
out in the mountains on a warm summer after- 
noon. A few moments ago we came into a cool, 
shady cove, and now we have come upon a beau- 
tiful spring beneath a great, overhanging rock. 
And now we are sitting by it looking down into 
its limpid depths. 

Isn’t it beautiful? So pure, so sweet, so calm, 
so unselfish; always giving, never asking anything 
in return. What is the secret of this beautiful 
thing? Why, its heart is open to an unseen foun- 
tain, and every moment it is receiving new sup- 
plies of pure, fresh, living water. Every drop 
of it is life, life, life. And because it is ever keep- 
ing its heart open to this unseen fountain it is 
overflowing in a little stream of service for the 
world. A tiny stream it is at first, but as it goes 
on it grows and grows and grows. Presently it 
pauses and forms a little pool to give a thirsty 
child drink. It goes on its way and now it pauses 
to form a pool to cool a man’s fevered brow. A’ 
little further on it pauses to form a pool to wash 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 173 


the blood from the wounds of a poor fellow way- 
laid along the road. Again it pauses to form a 
pool to bathe the temples of some weary woman 
fainting under the heat and burden of the day. 
And now it disappears in a brave venture down a 
deep, dark gorge. It looks like a desperate ven- 
ture and we fear it is lost. But listen! From far 
down the mountain side comes the swish and 
drone of a little wheel that turns a little mill, that 
grinds a little corn to feed a hungry world. 

Here is the life we call the religion of Jesus. 
Not a fountain of life and love alone, not a stream 
of service alone, but a fountain of life from which 
flows a stream of service. 

Here I am, trying to keep my heart open to Him, 
the Unseen Fountain of Life, the source of all the 
life and strength and courage and faith and love 
I need. And because I am keeping my heart open 
to Him, He is sharing His life with me; and be- 
cause His life is unceasingly flowing into my heart, 
my heart is overflowing in a little stream of loving 
service for Him and for my fellow-men. And so 
it happens that I am able to pause here and there 
to give a thirsty child drink. I pause again to 
cool a hard-driven man’s fevered brow. I pause 
again to wash the blood from the wounds of some 
poor fellow waylaid along the road. I pause again 
to bathe the temples of some weary woman, faint- 
ing under the burden and heat of the day. Oh, it 
is a little stream, and my heart often aches be- 
cause it is so small, but now and then as I go on 


174 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


my way something moves me to make a venture 
for Him and I plunge down some deep, dark gorge 
not knowing where I am going, and here and there 
I find that He has given me the strength to turn 
a little wheel, that turns a little mill, that grinds 
a little corn to feed a hungry world. 

- Here is the deepest need of man—life. And this 
need Jesus alone attempts to meet. And He meets 
Tt: 

Vv 


Painful as it is to speak so intimately of one- 
self, I feel that I ought to bear personal testi- 
mony to the truth of this teaching. Jesus has 
met my own deepest need; He has given me life. 
Since the day I cast my all upon Him as my Life- 
giver, I have had a supply of vital force for my 
spirit that has been sufficient to meet the demands 
of my job in life in spite of handicaps which up 
to that time had made the passing years an almost 
unbroken record of fruitless struggle. One will 
ask whether this might not be a mere matter of 
imagination. The answer is simple. In the midst 
of a serious illness you found yourself saying, ‘‘T 
have no life; I am barely existing.’’ How did you 
know? Because you had no strength. Was that 
a matter of imagination? That could be easily 
settled. You tried to get out of bed. That settled 
it. Gradually you grew better, and one day you 
were able to walk. A few days later you were 
saying to yourself, ‘‘Now I have life.’’ How did 


GREATEST REASON OF ALL 175 


you know? Because you had some strength. You 
no longer fell down a dozen times a day. 

In the same way I know that this experience of 
mine is not a mere matter of imagination. There 
was a time when I had no life in my spirit and I 
knew it. I knew it because I had no strength. I 
knew I had no strength because I fell down on 
my job a dozen times a day. A severe illness in 
early childhood deprived me of my vital force 
and left me physically utterly unequipped for life. 
I dragged my way through youth to manhood with 
a heart that was ever threatening to stop and a 
nervous system hopelessly out of gear. I thought 
that my one need was physical life. I was sure 
that if I had half the physical force of other 
men I could do something. But I did not have it, 
and there was no hope of getting it. By and by, 
I began to notice that some people I knew who 
were physical giants were doing nothing at all, 
and that some of the most useful men and women 
I knew—people of great moral or spiritual 
strength—had so little physical force that one 
wondered how they managed to keep going. By 
and by, I discovered that it was not their little 
physical vitality that was carrying them along, 
but their great spiritual vitality. They had 
enough strength in their spirits to go forward and 
do their work for Christ and humanity and pull 
their poor feeble bodies along with them. 

I need not tell the rest of the story. To-day, 
I have life in my spirit, and I know it. There is 


176 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


no immodesty in saying it, for I am conscious 
every day that it is not my own, that I do not 
deserve a particle of credit for it. Left to myself 
I could do nothing. I am conscious that ‘‘T live,’’ 
but I also have a consciousness that makes me 
hasten to add, ‘‘Yet not I, but Christ liveth in | 
me.’’ No, I am not comparing myself with Paul; 
Tam only saying what millions of men and women 
since Paul’s day have been able to say. How do 
I know that I have life in my spirit? Because I 
have some strength. I no longer fall down on my 
job. a dozen times a day. Oh, yes, I fail—fail 
miserably; but I don’t lose much time over it; 
there is something that enables me to rise to my 
feet and press forward again. And so long as I 
am conscious of Christ’s life in me I know that 
however often I may fail I shall not be a failure. 

And life is so different ; so fundamentally differ- 
ent. 

Realising all this as I do, I can no more think 
of Jesus as a mere human than I can think of the 
Father as mere shadow. Nor can I see anything 
to fear in the efforts which men who do not know 
Him are making to bring Him down to a purely 
human level. I have no more fear that anything 
can happen to Him than I have that a baby’s 
breath can blow out an evening star. 

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker 
of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ His only 
Son our Lord. Here I take my stand, and on this 
rock I rest my hope and risk my all, now and for- 
evermore. So help me, Lord Jesus. 


XIT 


HOW CAN WE PRESERVE OUR SENSE OF 
THE REALITY OF JESUS 


I 


T will be noticed that I have not laid any great 

| emphasis upon the sacrificial death of Jesus, 
and that I have not referred to His resurrec- 

tion at all. Of course this would be unpardonable 
in a book designed to convince unbelievers, but 
this discussion is intended to meet what I have 
conceived to be a peculiar need of the average 
Christian, and I feel that I shall be more likely 
to achieve my purpose if I omit any extended ref- 
erence to these two supreme evidences of His 
deity or divinity. I do not think it possible to 
over-emphasise either of these events; but in re- 
cent years we have laid so much stress upon the 
human in Jesus and so little upon the divine, that 
many people have come to think of His life as 
purely human, and to rest what faith they have in 
His divinity wholly upon His sacrificial death and 
resurrection. As a consequence when they ven- 
ture into the sphere of controversy, where these 
two great events are being subjected to a treat- 
ment that is as confusing as it is merciless, their 


faith is in danger of collapse. For this reason, it 
177 


178 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


seems to me, there is need just now for a new 
emphasis upon the divine in the life and character 
and teachings of Jesus that will help Christians to 
realise that the atmosphere of the divinity of 
Jesus pervades the whole story of His career, and 
that He was as truly divine in His life as he was 
in His sacrificial death and in His resurrection. 
Or, to put it a little differently, now that we 
are passing through a trial of faith which in some 
respects is as great as any of the trials that have 
overtaken the Church in the past, it is important 
that we should get such an impression of the di- 
vine in His life and character that when we come 
to the Cross and the Resurrection we shall need 
no proof of either, because we would feel that they 
were just what such a life and character called 
for. One may say that it is impossible to see the 
divine in the life of Jesus but for the light which 
the Cross and the open tomb cast back upon it, 
and that may be true; but it is not the light that 
makes His life divine; it only reveals it as divine. 
Before I realised this truth I was easily troubled 
by the questions which were being raised by critics 
over the doctrines of the Cross and the Resurrec- 
tion. To-day, I am looking at Jesus from another 
point of view and I can face these questions with- 
out dismay. I say to the man who is troubled just 
here: ‘‘ Very well, drop the matter for the present. 
Sometimes when we cannot get at the truth from 
one side it ig a good plan to try the other way 
round. What you need just now is to realise that 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 179 


Jesus Christ is the Son of God; if you cannot see 
His divinity in His cross or His resurrection, go 
back and look for it in His life. Simply adopt 
these two great teachings as working theories; 
just assume that they are true, and then look at 
the life and character and teachings of Jesus in 
the light which they shed upon it. If you will do 
this, and read the story solely to get at and satu- 
rate yourself with the mind and spirit of Jesus, 
sooner or later you will become conscious that you 
are looking upon One who is not only human but 
above human, and when you come to the end of 
His earthly life and look upon the Cross and the 
Resurrection, you will cease to think of them as 
working theories or assumptions; you will see His 
divinity in them as plainly as you have seen it in 
His life.’’ 

I hope I shall not be misunderstood. JI am not 
here saying that one can believe in Jesus as the 
Son of God without believing in His sacrificial 
death and resurrection. I am only suggesting to 
those who have not succeeded in reaching a satis- 
fying faith on these two points that they might 
try the other way round. Speaking for myself, I 
cannot understand how anyone can conceive of 
Jesus as the Son of God apart from these two 
supreme events. When I leave out the Cross, His 
life, so far as I can see, is meaningless. When I 
let the Cross stay and leave out the Resurrection 
He is a hopeless mystery. But I judge no man. I 
only mean to say that as for myself I prefer to 


180 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


stand in the light that shines from the face of 
the risen Christ. For I have found that in that 
light the mystery vanishes. 


It 


As I approach the end of my task I find myself 
facing a very practical question—to my mind the 
most pressing: question of our time. What can 
the modern Christian do to restore and preserve 
his sense of the reality of Jesus? We are, to- 
day, literally overwhelmed with problems which 
await the solution of this problem. The very ex- 
istence of our religion as a religion of power, so 
far as we are concerned, is depending upon it. 

We are still asking in a pathetic way: ‘‘What 
is the matter with us? Why is it that so many 
Christians are falling down on their job? Why 
have they no life, no passion, no courage, no power 
to do the things they know they ought to do?’’ 

If you will question people of this sort you will 
find that however widely they may differ in their 
religious experiences they are all alike in one re- 
spect: they have all lost their sense of the reality 
of Jesus. And if you will question the few men 
and women you know who are strong enough for 
their job—the people who are doing practically all 
the work of the world that is eternally worth while 
—you will find that whatever else they may have, 
all of them have a sense of the reality of Jesus. 

If you will go over the reasons I have given for 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 181 


believing in Jesus, you will find that not one of 
them is a reason that would appeal to us in the 
laboratory or the marketplace. I know of no rea- 
son for believing in anything that is of the spirit 
that appeals very strongly to us in either place. 
Certainly all the reasons we have for believing in 
the divine in Jesus are bound up in, or in some 
degree dependent upon, that something in us by 
which we feel that which we cannot see—that sense 
which enables us to realise and explore the realm 
of reality which is beyond both our physical and 
intellectual vision. 

The sense of the unseen is to-day struggling for 
its very existence. The programme of daily life 
that has been pressed upon us by our modern 
civilisation allows absolutely no room for it, and 
it is utterly inimical to it. The only people we 
know whose sense of the realities of the unseen is 
sufficiently strong to be really worth while in life 
are those who have had the courage to adopt for 
themselves a programme that gives it a chance. 

If I may judge from my own experience and 
from my observation of the lives of those who 
have opened their minds to me on this point, I can 
see no chance for the restoration or preservation 
of our sense of the reality of Jesus in the midst 
of our present civilisation unless we awaken to 
the necessity of adopting a daily programme that 
will enable us every day, if not several times a 
day, to pull ourselves out of this blinding mael- 
strom of material activities and pleasures, in 


182 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


which the present generation spends about all the 
time that is not spent in sleep, and seek a quiet 
spot where we can bring our spiritual vision to 
bear upon Him. I am aware that to many people 
this also sounds like ‘‘mystical nonsense,’’ but 
that does not alter the facts. If the religious his- 
tory of the race has established anything at all, 
it is the fact that all men and women of great 
moral or spiritual power have had a sense of the 
reality of God, and that they preserved their God- 
consciousness by frequently communing with Him 
in the quiet places of life. And if you will look 
around you, you will find that this is just as true 
of the strong men and women of our own day. 
Wherever you find power you find a consciousness 
of Christ, and wherever you find a consciousness 
of Christ you find a faithful observance of the 
quiet hour. 

I have known but two or three seeming excep- 
tions to this rule, and they proved to be only 
seeming. I have in mind at this moment a strong 
Christian character—a woman of heroic spirit, 
whose family was so large and whose home was 
so small that it was impossible for her to find a 
quiet spot anywhere. But her burdens became so 
heavy that she felt that she could not live without 
a consciousness of Christ, and by persistent effort 
she acquired the art of closing her eyes and ears 
in the midst of the noise and confusion of her 
crowded home, and fixing her mind for a few 
moments upon Him, and thus she secured prac- 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 183 


tically the same conditions which she would have 
had in a quiet room. 


iil 


T am aware that we are living in a very prac- 
tical age, and that there are good people who look 
upon this matter from what they call a practical 
point of view. They accept the fact of comrade- 
ship with Christ, but they insist that it is a spir- 
itual luxury—something quite beyond the reach of 
the average man—and insist that we should be 
content with the more practical task of getting 
people to follow Jesus simply as their example. 
That, they assure us, will meet their practical 
everyday needs, and that is the best we can hope 
for. 

But this suggestion includes a very large if as 
well as an exaggerated idea of the value of ex- 
ample. It is as easy to glorify good example as 
it is to glorify one’s mother; but in real life a 
vood example is very much like good advice; | 
its value depends upon one’s willingness and abil- | 
ity to follow it. There are good examples all 
around that incorrigible boy across the street, but 
thus far they have had no more effect upon him 
than the good advice which we have showered 
upon him. People are talking about the wonder- 
ful change that has come over John since he mar- 
ried Mary. Mary is the finest Christian character 
in town, and her example, they are saying, has just 


184 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


about made that rascal over. But John’s brother 
Jim married just as good a girl, and he is the 
same scoundrel to-day that he was the day he 
married her. Plainly it takes something more 
than example. 

Both John and Jim had the advantage of good 
example. But John had something which made 
the example available and Jim did not. Jim mar- 
ried Margaret according to law, but there was no 
real union. Their spirits did not knit together. 
Jim did not even know that Margaret had a spirit. 
He did not give himself a chance to find out. A 
man never knows his wife’s spirit until he takes 
the time to sit by her side in the still moments of 
the day, and thus give their spirits a chance to 
come in touch with each other. Then they become 
really acquainted; then they become real com- 
rades, and as comrades each begins to share the 
best that is in the other. Then the good example 
of each becomes available to the other. 

That was what happened in the case of John 
and Mary. They became real comrades, and in 
their comradeship he received from her spirit 
that which made it possible for her example to be 
of benefit to him. This did not happen in the case 
of Jim and Margaret, and so Margaret’s good 
example to-day means nothing more to Jim than 
her good advice. Her example falls upon blind 
eyes, just as her advice falls upon deaf ears. 

The same is true in our spiritual life. What- 
ever may be the value of example it can never 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 185 


take the place of comradeship. Nor can anything 
else. 

The religion of Jesus had its start in comrade- 
ship. The first thing Jesus did when He called a 
man to share in the work of building up His King- 
dom among men was to make him a comrade. The 
work that was to be done required men of His 
own mind and spirit, and He planned that they 
should get His mind and spirit through comrade- 
ship with Him. And so when He called those 
humble fishermen of Galilee He told them that 
they were not to go back to their business, but 
must stay with Him. He had a more important 
business for them than fishing for fish. He wanted 
to make them fishers of men. Thus He drew 
around Him a little group of friends, and for 
three years they enjoyed all the privileges of com- 
radeship with Him. They shared the riches of 
His mind; they learned His will and learned to 
fall in with it; they shared the riches of His spirit. 
Thus they gradually entered into the experience 
of sharing His very life—the vital force of His 
spirit—His love, His faith, His courage, His pas- 
sion, even something of His power. 

All through His life Jesus made use of the 
power of comradeship in extending His work. 
When His disciples had learned enough to go out 
and try to do a little work for His Kingdom, He 
was careful to see that no one went alone. They 
must go out two by two, that each might have the 
benefit of comradeship with the other. And when 


186 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


the time came for Him to end His earthly career, 
His one concern was that they should not be left 
alone. They must not separate and go to their 
homes. They must go back to Jerusalem and live 
together as comrades, one in mind and heart and 
interest and wait until He should return in the 
person of the Holy Spirit. Then they would enter. 
into a comradeship with Him that would never 
end. In that comradeship they would receive all 
that they needed to go out and do the work He 
had given them to do in the world. 

We must not forget that the first Church was 
simply a little group of followers of Jesus who 
loved Him and who loved one another, and that 
their work, which soon began to change the world, 
began because of what they received while they 
lived in comradeship with Him and with one an- 
other. 


Li 


In recent years the necessity of comradeship in 
the life of the world has been brought home to us 
in a heartbreaking way. We had been saying for 
years that the tragedy that was overtaking our 
modern homes was immorality. But, in recent 
years, we have come to see that for every home 
that has been wrecked by marital unfaithfulness, 
there are a dozen that have gone to pieces for no 
other reason than that husband and wife became 
strangers to each other. It is useless to mince 
matters; our divorce evil is increasing to-day 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 187 


mainly because the ever-increasing demands of 
our modern material civilisation upon our time 
are steadily driving a wedge between husbands 
and wives all over our land, and they are becom- 
ing strangers to each other. 

When John and Mary marry, their love is every- 
thing to them, and they allow no material demands 
to get in its way. Hvery evening, when the day’s 
work is over and the house is quiet, they seek a 
quiet place for a little while of spiritual comrade- 
ship. If there is an old-fashioned fireplace in the 
house, there they go and there they sit, four feet 
on the fender. And all the while they are sitting 
together in the stillness their spirits are knitting 
closer and closer together. And so long as they 
keep up that four-feet-on-the-fender habit, all 
the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot 
pull John and Mary\apart. But every day these 
ever-increasing demands on our social and busi- 
ness life are becoming more and more insistent, 
and in an evil hour they begin to yield to them, 
and one morning at breakfast Mary reminds John 
—and there are tears in her voice—that they have 
not sat together in the twilight for a month. A 
month later she repeats it, but there are no longer 
any tears in her voice. A few weeks later she 
happens upon a sentimental friend downtown who 
wants to know if she is keeping up her four-feet- 
on-the-fender habit, and Mary turns up her pretty 
little nose and exclaims, ‘‘Oh, mush!’’ And then 
we know that John and Mary have become 


188 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


strangers each to the other. And how often that, 
and that alone, is the beginning of the end! First 
strangers, then misquotations, misinterpretations, 
misrepresentations, suspicions, daggers—dagger- 
looks, dagger-thrusts—hate, hate, more hate— 
hell! 

To-day this terrible tragedy, which is repeated 
many thousands of times a year in our home life, 
is repeated just as often in our religious life. 
Only it is a one-sided misunderstanding. Every- 
where one goes one meets professing Christians 
who misinterpret and misunderstand and talk bit- 
terly of God, just as alienated husbands and wives 
misinterpret and misunderstand and talk bitterly 
of each other—and for the same reason. They 
started out to live a life of love through service 
plus comradeship, and in an evil hour they allowed 
their business or social or domestic demands to 
cheat them out of the time they were devoting to 
comradeship. 

Jesus is nowhere more explicit than He is just 
here. He tells us plainly that this life of love 
which we call religion comes from Him; that it 
is His own life in us, and that the only way to 
get it is through vital contact with Him. We must 
be one with Him, and if we would be one with 
Him we must live on and by what we may receive 
from Him. And this means that we must live with 
Him. As a devoted daughter lives in such inti- 
mate comradeship with her mother that she lives 
on her—feeds upon the riches of her mother’s 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 189 


mind, the riches of her heart; sits with her in 
the gathering twilight and drinks in her spirit— 
her love, her gentleness, her faith—all the in- 
effably beautiful things that go to make a mother 
the best there is—so we must live with Christ. 
‘‘Hixcept ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and 
drink his blood’’—except ye get your very life 
from Him—‘‘ye have not life in yourselves.’’ Or 
to use His more familiar figure, unless we abide in 
Him as the branch abides in the vine—unless we 
fall in with Him, open our whole being to Him— 
our minds, our hearts, everything—so that His 
life can run through us as the lifegiving sap of 
the vine runs through the branch, we are practi- 
cally dead; for apart from Him we can bear no 
fruit; we can do nothing. 

There is no other way. We cannot live His life 
unless we abide in Him, and we cannot abide in 
Him unless we keep in vital touch with Him, not 
only through service, but through comradeship. 
It is in the quiet hour of spiritual comradeship— 
comradeship through prayer and meditation and 
the reading of His Word—when our minds and 
hearts, no longer choked up with the blinding, 
deafening, absorbing materialities of life can open 
wide to Him, that we feed upon the riches of His 
mind and heart and drink in His spirit; and ‘‘He 
that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth 
in me and I in him.’’ Moreover, it is only by 
thus keeping in vital contact with Him that we. 
can receive that which we need to pour out ina 


190 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


stream of loving service, thus making possible a 
life of service that is really worth while. We are 
often told that service will take the place of com- 
radeship; but it is in comradeship that we get that 
which enables us to serve. 


Vv 


Let me say, in conclusion, that it is only when 
we have a sense of the reality of Jesus that we are 
able to realise how satisfying He is. And this, 
after all, is the important thing. 

In a Christmas greeting which I wrote a year 
ago, I said that the heart-hunger of the world to- 
day is not for a reasonable religion, as some 
would have us believe, but for a satisfying God. 
And as our fathers used to say, only a God who 
has something in common with us can satisfy us. 
‘A God and Jesus may appeal to our minds, but 
only a God in Jesus can satisfy our hearts. We 
have tried both, and we know. Men may as well 
give up this modern notion that though Jesus be 
stripped of His deity the world will go on follow- 
ing Him as before. The world will not do it. It 
may admire Him as before, but there is not enough 
power on earth to persuade a heartsick humanity 
to ery out to a merely human Jesus, as my heart 
cries daily to my divine Lord, ‘‘O Life, O Love, 
O Joy, O Hope, I rest my soul upon Thee.’’ 

Let us hold on to our divine Master. We had 
toc hard a time trying to find a God who would 


THE REALITY OF JESUS 191 


satisfy us to give Him up now. For ages and 
ages we searched for Him. We sought Him in 
the stars, and in the flowers, in the winds and in 
the seas, and in the far-off mountains. We scoured 
the deserts looking for His footprints. We honey- 
combed the earth seeking traces of His handiwork. 
And at last, one day, in the midst of our search, 
He suddenly revealed Himself unto us. For Jesus 
of Nazareth was God’s supreme effort to make © 
Himself known tomen. ‘‘God was in Christ recon- 
ciling the world unto himself.’’ I believe this with 
all my soul. When we looked at the stars we 
thought we saw the wisdom of God. When we 
looked at the mountains, we thought we saw the 
strength of God. When we looked at the flowers 
and the deep blue sky, and the golden sunshine, 
and at some beautiful mother bending over her 
new-born babe, we thought we saw the love of God. 
But when we looked upon Jesus we saw something 
in His face that said, ‘‘I am in the Father, and 
the Father is in me.’’ And our hearts were 
satisfied. eh 

The best thing we ever say to one we love best 
is that he is so satisfying. We never get beyond 
that. The older I grow the more I think of Jesus 
as the One who is so satisfying. I have known 
Him for a long while; and I am satisfied. I have 
tested Him in every exigency of life; and I am 
satisfied. I love Him as I could not love any hu- 
man being; and I am satisfied. He has all there 
is of me; and I am satisfied. 


ral 


192 WHY I BELIEVE IN JESUS 


How I wish I could find a word that would ex- 
press just how I feel towards Him! Perhaps J 
can come nearer expressing it in a picture. Not 
long ago I asked myself: ‘‘If you were talking 
to an audience about Jesus, and knew that you 
had but one moment more to live, and heaven 
should give you the power to use that moment as 
you wished, what would you do?”’ 

And my heart answered: ‘‘I should draw the 
whole human race together before me, and then— 
if I had the courage—I should ask Him to come 
and stand near me. And while every human eye 
was fixed upon Him, I should— 


‘‘Bring forth the royal diadem, 
And crown Him Lord of all.’ 


*‘Wherefore God also highly exalted him, and 
gave unto him the name which is above every 
name; that at the name of Jesus every knee should 
bow, of things in heaven and things m earth and 
things under the earth, and that every tongue 
should confess that Jesus Christ 1s Lord, to the 
glory of God the Father!’’ 


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